While most conservative and libertarian college students are still licking their wounds after last Tuesday’s election, at least one student writer sees an upside to the situation.

Meet Andrew Kaluza of Students For Liberty.

How the Liberty Movement Will Profit From Obama’s Failures

In light of the recent win by Barack Obama, there is an opportunity to understand the true nature of what Obama’s second term will mean for the societal mindset of America.  Relating it to the Bush presidency, we may be seeing the resurgence of an impending perfect storm for the Obama youth to distance themselves from the president and his party.

Eight Years of Bush

Besides the “Miss Me Yet” bumper sticker of George waving patronizingly at the camera, most Republicans have fervently distanced themselves from the Bush era politics since 2008.  They knew it was a lost battle to revert to apologetics when his approval ratings were in the tank after his second term ended.  Hovering around 22% in 2008, the Bush administration’s policies were mocked by academia, media, and many other influencing factors of society.  Mocking Bush became so prevalent in pop culture that a large portion of the youth of the Republican movement left the party out of shame.  The GOP lost their youth vote.  With the majority of the party being above the age of 48, The Grand Old Party must realize that one to two-thirds of its membership will be dead or too decrepit to make the trip to the polls in 20 years.  Since the Republicans now garner merely a small fraction of the youth vote, they will be dead in the water trying to effect political change.  In fact, the youth vote is largely liberal or libertarian now thanks to the disenfranchisement of Bush Republicanism.

Juxtaposing 2008 with 2004, the political climate eight years ago reflected Republican patriotism, with approval ratings averaging around 50%.  Now, Obama’s 52% is ominously close to Bush’s near the end of his first term. Despite the fact that there is little the president will be able to do to prevent the economic calamities that will most surely happen in the next presidential term, Obama will likely be blamed.  And if his approval ratings will be anything similar to Bush’s again, we will see a mass exodus of Democratic youth from the Democratic Party.

Obama’s Second Term is Doomed for Failure

Obama is digging his grave by delivered himself along with the rest of America into a mess. Debt is soaring to $16 trillion and expected exponentially higher. Entitlement programs are sucking unmanageable amounts of money. More wars are sure to come. The Federal Reserve will implement even greater inflationary measures.  The situation for the 2012-2016 presidential term is impossible to remedy without large-scale spending cuts from government programs.  Obama simply can’t save the situation, as he’s certainly not superman as we’ve clearly seen from his first term.

A Rapid Growth of the State Will “Boil the Frog”

Political philosopher Eric Voegelin famously thought that it took a political apocalypse to to create heaven on earth.  After all, when a frog is placed in a pan and the heat rapidly turned up, the frog will immediately jump off.  However, if the frog were to be placed in the pan and the heat slowly applied over a long period of time, the frog would stay and cook alive.  As an analogy for society, the court of public opinion is generally more accepting of policies that are slowly implemented over long periods than ones that are implemented quickly.  If the goal is to get society to realize that liberty is universally and timelessly paramount, then hastily turning up the heat would be a good strategy.  Let the public understand that it is time to jump out of the pan.  With Barack Obama in office for another four years, his socialistic policies will receive the much ado blame.  The liberal youth will be so embarrassed and disenchanted by Obama’s ill decisions that they will leave the Democratic identity and seek another.  It will be prime time for libertarians to then step in and show them a home.