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.