There is a quote – endlessly repeated and often misattributed to Winston Churchill – that runs something like the following: If you are 20 and not a liberal, you have no heart. If you are 40 and not a conservative, you have no brain.

Taken on its own terms, this observation gives progressives a very narrow window of time in which to operate – something the Daily Kos appears to have recognized, in a rare moment of lucidity:

“Of course, we can’t make such a simplistic argument.  We don’t think that more government is always best.  In fact, even arguing over the size of the government is folding to a conservative narrative.  But how can we begin to discuss politics in the political world of today without tripping over conservative buzz words?  The honest truth is, we can’t.”

But there is hope for the progressive movement, according to our anonymous writer, in the following:

“1.) The blogosphere more-or-less is ours.  The right-wing attempts to match the left’s web presence has largely looked like our attempt to match their radio work.  The web belongs to the young, and the young, at least for now, are with us.

2.) Satire is ours.  Jon Stewart likes to deny his real-world impact, calling his show comedy.  And it is.  But it has great impact none-the-less.  Stewart and Colbert have made a huge difference by exposing fraud and corruption.  And most of this has been on the right.  Even when they come at us, they come from the left.  That kind of work, over time, builds values in the viewers that move them toward the left, like Limbaugh’s daily listeners eventually become Republicans.  And the right has fallen prey to attempting their version of political satire.  And, as you probably know, those attempts have been incredible failures.

3.) Academia remains reality-based, and that is good for us.  Although I think the accusations of campus “liberal bias” are greatly exaggerated, issues like human rights, equality, and environmentalism are clear values of the liberal arts community.  And these values are more than just issues for progressives.  They go a long way in pointing toward a framework for thinking progressively.”

Now, obviously, there are a few things that strike me as a bit foolish about this. For one thing, calling Academia reality-based strikes me as similar to calling Marvin the Martian carbon-based.

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The Atlas Economic Research Foundation – a libertarian leaning organization – recently released a video featuring Foundation Vice-President Tom G. Palmer. Titled “Free Trade: The Great Prosperity Machine,” the video aims to make a compelling case for why free trade is good for everyone, not just foreign competitors, and makes reference to the classic libertarian economist Frederic Bastiat. Interested viewers can look here:

However, there are some problems with the video. For one thing, I’m not sure precisely who Palmer thinks his audience is, or who he wants it to be. Is he trying to persuade people on the Left? If so, then I don’t know how effective it is to talk about the benefits of exchange, since most Leftists view the exchanges that go on in trade relationships as fundamentally exploitative.

Moreover, Palmer’s argument that trade generates peace, while it could persuade some people to switch their position, probably won’t make a dent in the hardcore isolationist Left, which views trade as just another element of the military industrial complex and of the globalized order that underlies it. Maybe Palmer intends his video to speak to the more moderate technocratic Left, insofar as he uses scientific metaphors, but this seems like preaching to the choir. The moderate technocratic Left, as personified by Bill Clinton, has often been an ally of the internationally-oriented Right and the libertarian movement when it comes to trade, and I have yet to see any indicators that this attitude is changing.

What about the protectionist Right? Here things aren’t particularly encouraging either.

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If you’ve been watching the fiasco surrounding the oil spill in the gulf, you already know the mainstream media meme that has cropped up around it. “Yes, President Obama has failed to stop the spill thus far,” the press tell us. “Yes, he’s demonstrated that his promises of supreme competence were overblown. Yes, his leadership has become so questionable that even James Carville has attacked him for it. Yes, some of the alternatives being offered in spite of all of this are being ignored, and yes, President Obama has failed to inspire confidence among everyday Americans about his ability to handle this crisis. But one thing we will not deny is that President Obama cares. He is a man of deep humanity, and deep empathy (and where have we heard that word before) for the suffering of those affected by the spill, and he cares.”

What I am about to ask will require readers to engage in a supreme act of charity: Despite all the evidence to the contrary, all the evisceration which Rush Limbaugh and every other conservative commentator have piled on this administration, all the evidence that the media will never believe anything but the very best about this President even as he takes this country down the road to serfdom at a speed that would make Dale Earnhardt Jr feel queasy, and despite all the emotionless, meaningless, platitude-laden babble that the President has been spewing since the spill began, I want the readers to assume, just for the sake of argument, that the media is telling the truth. Despite what appear to be severe rhetorical and emotional shortcomings in his speeches and his own bearing, imagine that underneath the hyper-rational mask, President Obama really does care.

So what?

Has that “caring” done anything to stop the spill? Has it given President Obama one single, solitary constructive idea about how to solve the problem (other than “Plug the Hole,” that is)? Does President Obama have the ability to fly out to the Gulf Coast and, like Ma-Ti in Captain Planet, dissolve the oil with nothing but the magically empathic effusions of his beating heart? And if not, then even if we concede that President Obama cares about those affected by this crisis,  how is that remotely relevant to his ability to solve it? As per the usual liberal tag line, we are expected to believe that President Obama’s good intentions alone should assuage us of his competence, but have they done anything at all? The answer is as devastating as it is obvious: No.

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Given the strong prospects for GOP resurgence in the upcoming elections, and the intimate connection which said resurgence is sure to have with the fortunes of the Tea Party Movement, it is no surprise that advice is presently being offered to that movement from all sides. The most recent instance of that advice comes from Cato Institute scholar John Samples, who has released a video under the aegis of the Institute entitled “Advice to Tea Partiers.”

Advice to Tea Partiers

Samples is also the author of the book The Struggle to Limit Government, a political history book which convincingly makes the case for a libertarian resurgence within the GOP grounded on Reaganite principles. The video, which in some ways is a much simplified version of the book, offers five points of advice, many of which are well-taken, but some of which are grounded more in wishful thinking than in actual political savvy.

On that note, the video begins with the dubious statement that because of the “spending” and “expansion of government” that was present during the Bush years, “the Republican Party is part of the problem.” This is a lead-in to point 1, entitled “Republicans Aren’t Always Your Friends.” Samples points out, correctly, that when Reagan’s budget director David Stockman tried to get much-needed budget cuts through the White House, all the various department heads opposed these cuts even as they worked under one of the most spending-averse Presidents since Calvin Coolidge. He takes this as evidence that the culture of entrenched programs in Washington can corrupt everyone, Republicans included.

On this much he is right. However, it’s worth noting that part of the issue with Reagan’s cabinet was also that it had to be selected in order to pass a Democrat-controlled Senate confirmation process, and thus was probably more moderate than anything Reagan envisioned. Thus, the conclusion that can be drawn from Samples’s video is not that mistrust of Republicans is the right option, but rather that mistrust of Democratic legislatures is the right option, for even under Republican presidents, such legislatures can wreak havoc on the agenda of limited government.

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As any exasperated advocate of commonsense education reform can tell you, liberals and their allies in the teachers unions will, like drunken spammers, never cease to declaim on how “PUBLIC EDUCATION NEEDS MORE MONEYS LOL.” Yet, as highlighted in the video above, a recent study by the CATO Institute has found that public educators routinely lie about the exorbitant costs of education so as to keep parents from realizing just how little the vaunted Leftist sacred cow of public education actually provides for their child. Yes, you read right. When it comes to public education costs, some of the biggest liars are people who our tax dollars pay to teach the truth.

Just as an example, the CATO study found that, while Washington DC public schools claim to spend about $17,000/student, the actual price tag is closer to $28,000. Just to put this in perspective, this is a higher price than the private Potomac School, Georgetown Preparatory School, Stone Ridge School and Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School. In fact, it’s only $2,000 less than Sidwell Friends, the ultra-exclusive private academy where President Obama’s own daughters attend.

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As anyone who has any recollection of the aftermath of the 2008 election cycle knows, the GOP is hopelessly behind on the internet, cannot possibly marshal any web resources on its behalf because it’s stuck in the 19th century politically and will be eclipsed by the forces of Web 2.0 as surely as Democrats were eclipsed by talk radio.

Or at least, that’s what the Mainstream Media force-fed to people after the 2008 election cycle. Naturally, like most Mainstream Media memes, it was an abject lie, but still, somehow the fear worked its way around establishment GOP circles to the point that a veritable avalanche of hysteria crashed down on party activists. “Why, if the internet swings to the Left,” many supposedly “concerned conservative” commentators opined, “then surely our restrictive, overly ideological makeup will make it impossible for us to attract anyone!”

One can’t blame them for buying an argument which was made with such nauseating frequency. Yet, as recent events since the Obama election have shown, the idea that conservatism cannot capture the internet is not at all accurate. What few people may realize, however, is why this argument was so inaccurate, and more importantly, why it took a Messianic bumbler like Obama to expose its falsehood. With respect, therefore, I must disagree with my fellow contributor’s rejection of youth culture as something irrevocably tainted by liberalism, though I understand his frustration entirely.

However, as I mean to prove, the current youth ethos embodied by internet subculture is fundamentally conservative in character, even if its denizens have not yet caught on to that fact. In order to prove this, I will draw on knowledge that I have gained both as an avid internet user and as a member of a generation for whom digital communication is a second language – knowledge which would require investigating not only the harmless environs of Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, but also the darkest, least talked about nether-regions of the internet – websites which produce 90% of the internet’s cultural references, and yet are so riddled with perversity that their own patrons take it as an unspoken rule never to talk about them.

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