The “ghouls” you speak of are just people who were able to afford shit back in the day.

Healthcare, a house, a few vacations abroad per year, kids and their education, all on (for the most part) just 1 job.

If you had all these things, yes, you’d probably be more FISCALLY conservative to preserve whatever amount of money you had saved and use it for retirement

Nowadays that reality has changed and was twisted into something that doesn’t reflect what it was, but the saying remained the same.

Basically shit doesn’t mean what it used to mean and people forgot that language and concepts evolve or erode over time.

Or if we want to make it more visual, on a scale from 0-100 where 0 is full liberal and 100 is full conservative, the needle was moved so far to the right that the “you’ll grow more conservative as you grow older” is now on the left side of the current status quo.