Put On A Happy Face

Maybe the reason people become more conservative as they grow older is because it takes so much less energy than remaining liberal and idealistic. Vice President Dick "Dick" Cheney is several decades old (the only way to be certain of his actual age is to cut him in half and count his rings) and he is the most conservative being on the planet currently.
Hippies used to be America's youth. Now they run politically correct ice cream companies or sign on-line petitions for Move On Dot Org. Liberals stopped calling themselves that after Michael Dukakis drove that tank into infamy nearly twenty years ago. Being a conservative, by contrast, is so achingly cool that we now ascribe the prefix "Neo" to them. Welcome to the Matrix.
From Wikipedia.com: "To a conservative, the goal of change is less important than the insistence that change be effected with a respect for the rule of law and traditions of society. The traditional enemy of conservatism, therefore, is radicalism (not, as is often asserted, liberalism)." Radicalism, then must really take it out of a person. Who do you know over the age of twenty-five who you would consider "radical?"
Back in the late 1800s, there were even radical Republicans. I know this because I looked it up. These were the ones who demanded a more aggressive prosecution of the war and the faster destruction of slavery and Confederate nationalism. Liberal Republicans (like Abraham Lincoln) were more tolerant and argued for restraint against the Radical Republicans hard-line "total war" view. For what it's worth, most of these guys had beards.
So maybe it's still all about the energy expended. There is an old saw about how it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile. If this is the case, then why are there so many crabby old conservatives?