Big Government Is Your Destiny

Despotic altruism with other people's money is baked into the pie.  Lefty policy keeps coming out of the oven and is always inedible.  You can blame having more parents per kid than ever before.   Where two parents may have cared for four kids, now it's possible for four parents to be caring for one kid (on alternate weekends), an eight-fold increase in supervision.  Kids hardly play without a controlling adult present and enter college ready to cry about micro-aggression, choosing tattling over managing.  That ratio of supervising adults to children is trending higher for the foreseeable future.  Today's children will become adults who think it normal for the state to micromanage all citizens, treating them as children.

Baked in

Policies that give government more say will be popular with them.  It's baked into the demographic pie.

Remember too that singleton children grow up differently than we did.  They don't run around squabbling, building forts, taking turns skipping rope, playing pick-up baseball, and learning how to get along with dozens of other free-range kids in the neighbourhood.    Instead they went to T-ball and art class and swimming lessons in Mom's car.  They were sent to summer school, tutored and taken on escorted tours to Europe for spring break.  In China, because of enforced abortions, they raised a generation known as "Little Princes".  We're next, producing an entitlement generation that will vote for entitlement politics, preferably using someone else's money to secure their own comfort.

"Demographics is destiny".  There is a hopeful corollary.  These same new adults are going to be extraordinarily long-lived with 130 being a normal life-span.  They are going to be more conservative voters because they'll have something worth hanging onto: a little property, a network of relationships and values they have counted on for decades.

Does despotic altruism with OPM work?  It's baked into the pie for the foreseeable future and will continue to emerge and re-emerge whether it works or not. 
There you have it: two conflicting trends, both arising from demography and more deep-seated than questions of High-Information-Voters versus Low-Information-Voters.