Today the New York Post published an especially idiotic opinion piece by author and film critic Kyle Smith.

He extrapolates all kinds of things from a recent survey about the habits of young people published in The Economist. Since drinking, smoking and violent crime are shown to be down among today’s youth, the author dares to dream that this might have political implications down the road.

According to a Pew survey, the “next-generation left” has a huge, generational disagreement with older, traditional left-liberals. Among the older liberals, for instance, 83% identify “circumstances” as the cause of poverty. Nexties are almost evenly split on this, with 47% blaming circumstances and 42% blaming “lack of effort.”

That is a HUGE generational disagreement?!?!? You don’t suppose that once some of these kids get out in the workforce, their views on “effort” and its relationship to economic success might evolve just a bit?

Less surprisingly, next-generation liberals tilt hugely left on social issues, and this, they say, is the reason they vote Democrat, in many cases against their stated economic beliefs. A commenter on a New York Times piece on the Pew survey ticked off a list of economic beliefs that placed him to the right of center, then concluded, “The Democrats hold onto us only because of the Republic[an] obsession with religion, sexual repression and environmental denial.”

Another way to spin that idea is that the Democrats hold onto young voters because of the media’s successful bid to paint Republicans as obsessed with these things. (Or was 2001-2009 America a Puritan theocracy?)

Ah, the old liberal media! I guess his point is that it is powerful enough to pull the wool over everyones eyes TODAY, but in the future is it just going to go away so emerging adults can really see the true nature of the GOP.

The gay-marriage debate is winding down and may be over by 2016. Some Republicans are outflanking the Hobby Lobby decision, and making a huge step in a libertarian direction, by calling for over-the-counter birth control. What if the Republican party starts to promote candidates who simply can’t be painted as sexually repressive, oil-crazed religious freaks?

What if everyone reading this flaps their arms and flies to the moon? That seems just as likely as the author’s dream that the libertarian wing of the party can dominate the primaries in 2016 and take over the GOP.

I would like to ask Smith to take a look at this list of potential GOP hopefuls tweeted out by Reince Priebus earlier this week and tell me how many of them are going to consider the gay marriage debate to be finished 18 months from now: