Greg Mankiw, deep inside the Harvard bubble

I guess we could have seen this coming. Greg Mankiw, Ec10 mastermind and former Bush advisor, trying to explain why Republicans so dramatically lost the youth vote:

Why? I am not enough of a political scientist to be sure, but recent conversations I have had with some Harvard undergrads have led me to a conjecture: It was largely noneconomic issues. These particular students told me they preferred the lower tax, more limited government, freer trade views of McCain, but they were voting for Obama on the basis of foreign policy and especially social issues like abortion. The choice of a social conservative like Palin as veep really turned them off McCain.

So what does the Republican Party need to do to get the youth vote back? If these Harvard students are typical (and perhaps they are not, as Harvard students are hardly a random sample), the party needs to scale back its social conservatism. Put simply, it needs to become a party for moderate and mainstream libertarians.

This saddens me. That Mankiw actually thinks Harvard students -- among the most privileged, self-important, limousine-libertarian groups of people in the country -- could be a representative sample of anything is beyond ridiculous. (Not to mention, those students who wind up discussing politics with His Conservative Holiness are likely either wingnuts or Ec10 sycophants.) "Perhaps" is not nearly a strong enough qualifier here.

...Also, Ross Douthat, incidentally a rather disgruntled Harvard alum, is right to point out in response that today's young people are generally liberal on economic as well as social issues. I would go further and suggest that the "liberaltarianism" Mankiw's reaching for is basically a yuppie fantasy, a silly and impractical ideology which exists nowhere -- except silly and impractical places like Cambridge.

It'll take a long time before the elite media can admit it, and the right wing never will, but redistributionism is popular; we just saw a resounding affirmation of that, after Republicans called Obama a SOCIALIST!! at the top of their lungs and, surprise, Obama won anyway. (Don't even get me started on "limited government and free trade," which are not exactly big-ticket vote-movers either, DLCism notwithstanding.) Point is: people who think that kids these days are predominantly libertarian are probably spending way too much time writing textbooks.

The More Things Change...

Between the bazillions of debates about the state of liberalism and conservatism (which, if the blogosphere is to be believed, undergo Revolution or at least Crises of Confidence about every thirty-five seconds) it's comforting to read somebody like Ross Douthat pointing out that our political alignments are still basically the same as they were in 1965--

I think [conservative writers Poulous and Dreher] are misreading the contemporary American left, though, if they think there's any kind of significant fusionism waiting to happen between disillusioned lefties and the anti-Bush Right. ...Most of the smart young lefties I know aren't interested in some grand convergence with disillusioned populist-conservatives; they're interested in harnessing the kind of "office-park populism" that gave us Jim Webb and Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester in order to dramatically expand social democracy in the United States. For some, this means a return the old-time religion (a higher minimum wage, strong unions, government jobs programs, etc.); for others, it means a smarter, more growth-friendly form of social democracy (think Denmark, rather than France); for most, it means some combination thereof. But the overall model is still bigger government plus cultural permissiveness, not some kind of "small is beautiful" left-conservatism out to defend the permanent things against the ravages of modernity.

The left's vision of an expanded welfare state as both the answer to populist anxieties and the guardian of social liberalism is a perfectly coherent worldview, and it's one that I think has a good chance of accomplishing many of its objectives over the next few decades. (When I say that things are going well for liberals right now, that's what I mean - not just the Dems might trounce the GOP in '08, but that the overall political climate is as favorable to social democracy as it's been in thirty years.) But it's not the kind of worldview that's likely to want, or need, an alliance with the partisans of crunchy conservatism and putting Kansas First.

Douthat is right. Liberalism neither wants nor needs an influx of weepy self-hating post-Bush Republicans who think we can offer them political salvation. George Bush was a bad president but he was not a hydrogen-bomb on the political scene; our principles remain the principles we have held basically since FDR, and conservative thought remains totally anathema to them. Considering the strength of the political coalition liberalism has built today, it would only be to our detriment if we bothered to open the tent to these destructive right-wing freaks, however nonconformist they may be. (And yes, this also applies to "liberaltarianism", one of the most unholy combinations of stupid and unnecessary to ever appear in political thought.)

As far as I'm concerned as many conservatives as possible should go down with George Bush's ship. These people, it has been consistently demonstrated since Warren Harding, destroy everything they touch; they are menaces to society, plain and simple. And for us, as liberals and Democrats we are not obligated to give their ideas any quarter, no matter how many puppy-dog eyes the Reason kids make at us; the social-democratic plan we operated on under FDR and LBJ seems to be working again just fine. We progressives, and whatever government we end up with in 2008 -- and if you're a betting man you're betting it's Democratic -- would be stupid to listen to Rod Dreher or anyone else who suggests we should build some funky postmodern left-right coalition. Remember the old rule: don't fix what ain't broke.