This is all my fault. I have failed at life.

Conor Friedersdorf flags a not very impressive op-ed by Hannah Giles, best known for her role in the ACORN Videos. Key quote:

Young, truly devoted liberals, who can defend and properly communicate what they believe and formulate their own ideas to help their team are hard to come by. Very hard. Now, it is true, the Left in Washington has a giant stronghold in Hollywood. There are dozens of young actors/comedians/musicians/artists who side with the political left and promote their policies publicly, encouraging the average youth to behave and think as they do.

But what young warriors do the liberals have? I’m not asking about the automated liberal-spewing machines, or the professional foamers in the blogosphere. Not the kind of public-school-educated robots who grew up obeying Hollywood and defying their parents. I’m talking about leaders, the thinking types.

Ponder this for a moment: currently, names like Aaron Schock, Jason Mattera, James O’Keefe, Evan Baehr, Brendan Steinhauser, Lila Rose and Ben Shapiro are popping up on the public radar. Besides being under 30, this crew is desperately fighting for America on the conservative policy/political side of things, and the scary/really cool thing about it is they have the smarts, creativity, guts, and resolve to do so.

The only young liberal that I would consider in their league is the 25 year-old Ezra Klein of Newsweek. He is extremely intellectual, creative and effective at communicating his ideas to mass audiences. That’s right, his ideas. He doesn’t just parrot what the leftist elites in Washington are saying. And that deserves credit; it is hard to formulate your own thoughts on issues and devote yourself to ensuring they are communicated accurately and efficiently.

Reading her list of "thinking types" on the young right, I feel kind of like one of the overeducated twenty-something characters in The Emperor's Children who know that, despite their seeming youth and promise, they have somehow irreversibly screwed up everything. While both The Emperor's Children and Giles's column are kind of awful, they are kind of awful in completely different ways. It feels like a perverse achievement, somehow, that Giles's awfulness conjures up a normally completely opposed form of awfulness. There ought to be a literary term for this, but I can't think of one.