Politics & Power Quote by Jeffrey Bernard

Aging doesn’t just add years; it tightens the screws. Jeffrey Bernard is playing on that familiar cliche - the older you get, the more “conservative” you become - then yanking it away from party politics and dropping it into temperament. His emphasis is the tell: he’s less interested in ideology than in the creeping instinct to protect what’s left of your time, your body, your dignity, your energy.

Bernard, a journalist with a cultivated reputation for hard living, knows the joke has teeth. “Conservative” here means risk-averse, routine-hungry, less eager to be impressed, less willing to pay for mistakes with physical misery. It’s about self-preservation, not moral posturing. The subtext is almost physiological: hangovers worsen, late nights cost more, friendships thin out, and the margin for reinvention narrows. You stop gambling with your future because you can finally see it.

The line also slips in a quiet rebuke to lazy political storytelling. Not every life-arc bends toward right-wing voting; what changes is your tolerance for chaos. Bernard’s framing gives older people a different, more intimate kind of conservatism: keeping the familiar close, editing out drama, retreating from the theater of novelty. It’s wry, but not merely cynical. It admits that “getting older” can look like betrayal from the outside, when from the inside it feels like triage.

Context matters: in late-20th-century British media culture, “conservative” is a loaded label. Bernard defuses it by turning it into a personal diagnosis - a way to describe the slow, unglamorous recalibration that happens when consequences stop feeling hypothetical.