Reddit reviews A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s

I've known a fair number of people who have changed from red tribe to blue as you describe, but I've also known plenty of people who were born blue tribe to relatively moderate parents, and then evolved into a kind of heightened or radicalized version of their blue tribe values in high school or college for a while (which usual involves things like militant veganism) until they burn themselves out, in a way that is not too dissimilar to equivalents on the right (say fundamentalist Muslim children of moderate assimilated Muslim immigrant parents, or super Southern Baptist or Mormon children of pretty moderate Southern Baptist or Mormon parents, something I experienced first hand a lot).

There is a kind of idealism underneath this that makes a great deal of sense for the young - they shared their parents values, but don't understand why they aren't living up to them.

I don't know of modern research on these patterns, but as a nice (older) example of exactly this kind of phenomenon, here's an interesting Atlantic piece from 1967, talking about the Haight in San Francisco, and the rise of hippies.

The following paragraph from that piece stuck with me back when I read it:

"Many hippies lived with the help of remittances from home, whose parents, so straight, so square, so seeming compliant, rejected, in fact, a great portion of that official American program rejected by the hippies in psychedelic script. The 19th Century Was A Mistake The 20th Century Is A Disaster. Even in arrest they found approval from their parents, who had taught them in years of civil rights and resistance to the war in Vietnam that authority was often questionable, sometimes despicable. George F. Babbitt, forty years before in Zenith, U.S.A., declared his hope, at the end of a famous book, that his son might go farther than Babbitt had dared along lines of break and rebellion."

Likewise, the following really good history book about radicals on both the left and right in the 60s, which performed a bunch of first hand interviews with activists from that era, found that, while there was some of what we'd call red-to-blue crossover, many, many of the activists had, essentially, their parents values, but often with a much harder, more radicalized edge. Many of the young left-wing organizers in the 60s were explicitly atheist Jews who had abandoned their parents Reform Judaism while largely sharing their basic values and world view. Many of the young right-wing organizers of the era were the less moderate children of somewhat more moderate Catholic immigrant parents.

Granted, this last example is talking about particular exceptional people, outliers.

Even now, I get the sense that a big source of momentum behind the rise of the Alt-Right / Intellectual Dark Web / Jordan Peterson / whatever is that there is a giant of cohort of young men who abandoned the Religious Right / Moral Majority religious framework of their parents, who nevertheless respond positively to something like a rehabilitated secular vision of conservatism, and who find a lot of progressive values and rhetoric alien and, ultimately, off-putting, once progressivism got out of its defense crouch and started making full-throated claims on its values after Obama had been in office for a while.

But this is all just my impressions and musing. I would be extremely interested in knowing some actual demographic data about all this stuff.