Good or bad, the voting habits of young Americans are remarkably similar to their parents. At first glance, this pattern seems to differ from Winston Churchill’s observation “if you are not a liberal at 20 you have no heart and if you are not a conservative at 40 you have no brain.” Upon closer observation, you will find most people do follow the Churchill Migration from liberalism to conservatism, but do so minimally so as to never leave the comfort of the party from which they began. To actually break a bad voting booth habit and switch party allegiance requires an earth shattering event. Rare, but it happens. A harsh reality is about to shock millions of millennials into switching ideologies. Here is why.

Conservatism is a thinking man’s ideology with decisions based on fact and reason. Advancing a cause strictly because it feels swell is strikingly absent on the right. To the contrary, progressivism is a logic-free ideology based entirely on emotion. “Wouldn’t universal healthcare with single party payer be wonderful,” is a mantra which launches liberals into action. Progressives never ask “at whose expense,” because their only concern is feeling good about themselves. The conflict which will spark a nuclear Churchill Migration is exposed in a recent Reason-Rupe poll of 2,400, 18 to 29-year-olds.

Interestingly, while 42 percent of respondents prefer socialism, only 16 percent can actually define it. This news brings tears of victorious joy to those in university faculty lounges who understood their purpose was to fill the young minds with great self-esteem and just enough intellect to follow orders without thinking critically about their positions or actions. Our system of federally funded higher indoctrination produces a plethora of perfect progressives.

Deeper in the Reason-Rupe poll is the conflict which captured my attention. Nearly 70 percent of millennials prefer government guaranteed healthcare, housing and income while 78 percent view America’s ballooning debt as a major problem. They are beholden to mutually exclusive positions. The sparks will fly once millennials struggling to get ahead discover the very politicians, programs and policies they reflexively supported in their younger years have knocked several rungs from their ladder of success. Churchill will be proven right in district after district from sea to shining sea. It will be fun to watch if you have protected your family and yourself from the economic fallout which will inevitably occur. To complete this discussion I must mention the oddity of those who mature and swing liberal; a direction entirely opposite to the idea suggested by Churchill.

Every population contains outliers who move opposite to logic. Churchill must have known there would be politicians migrating from conservatism to liberalism as they aged, but perhaps he felt their presence so small as to not be worthy of mention. Like salmon swimming downstream, this oddity could be dismissed as dementia, but I believe such a transition is better explained by acknowledging an even bigger evil. In 1887, English historian Lord Acton wrote, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It is entirely possible those moving from the political right to the left have the nefarious yearning to be elected into the ruling class so as to secure their future power by giving away your stuff. There is simply no other reason a mature and rational person would abandon conservatism to embrace liberalism. Think about it.