One of the questions I asked Tony Blankley today had to do with reaching the "other side." If indeed the American public is divided, as he says, between those who believe the threat of Muslim terrorism is great and those who believe it is not so great, how do we who believe the former, convince the latter? (I worry that our society is so polarized that we bloggers are stuck preaching to the choir.)
It's taken me a while to blog about this because on reflection, it's funny I should ask that. When invited to the call, I didn't know the first thing about Tony Blankley. When he was a speech-writer for Pres. Reagan and senior advisor to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, I was a lefty. I didn't listen to Reagan if I could help it and I certainly never listened to Newt Gingrich. As far as I knew at the time, the opposition was there simply to be despised, from a distance. I never listened, I never gave them a fair chance, I never knew anything about them or what they thought or said. What was important for me to know was The Liberal Position, which I knew already: they were wrong, hateful, and to be hated.
This is an extremely embarrassing thing to admit, and for the life of me I don't know how I could have wasted decades of my life being so utterly closed-minded in this regard and not even knowing it, thinking in fact that I was quite the opposite. I inherited liberalism at a young age and never questioned it. I learned early on that one simply adhered to the party line because one's identity was staked on it. It wasn't something you thought about it, it was simply a knee-jerk reaction that became ingrained over time. If you were smart, if you were sophisticated, if you cared about the "little guy," you were a Democrat. period. Everyone I knew was a Democrat (or somehow misguided). Conservatives were a cartoonish enemy that one looked down upon, and yes, hated.
How funny it is then, that here I was today, asking Tony Blankley how to cross that divide.... from the other direction! I shouldn't have asked the question because I should have known (and volunteered) the answer. Mr. Blankley's answer was that he believes there is crossover. After all, as partisan as he is, he reads the New York Times and some lefty blogs, and he's curious to know what the other side thinks. However, if my experience can be generalized at all, the Left is just not like that. Being on the Left is not about what you think, it's about who you think you are.
Yikes, I'm starting to feel like I was in a cult and am only now getting fully deprogrammed.
The really amazing aspect of all this is that the man is obviously brilliant. He finished writing The West's Last Chance: Will We Win The Clash of Civilizations? last May, and in it had predicted Muslim terrorist attacks on London and Muslim violence in the streets of Europe, specifically Paris. He was hoping to be proven "excessively alarmist," but in fact he had it sur le nez. It has all come to pass, and the way he had figured how it would play out was from following "where the facts will lead."
While I was spending decades being smug and closed-minded, Tony Blankley was out satisfying his curiosity. One thing he told us that stuck with me was that in his youth he had travelled through Europe, in and of itself not terribly special. What's striking, though, is that while he was there, he sought out people who had fought in the French resistance, because he wanted to know what they thought.
You want to read a book by a man like that? A man who has that kind of curiosity and consequently, incredible depth and breadth of knowledge? Someone who follows not an agenda as much as "where the facts will lead"? I for one am fascinated, so much so that I went out after the conference call to a local (lefty) bookshop. They didn't have his book (of course), but said they would order it for me. Then I went to the public library around the corner. They didn't have it either, but I put in a request for the library to order it, and they at least seemed interested and anxious to please. One way or another I'm going to read the book.
It's so ironic that the Left considers itself the exclusive home of intellectualism, when in fact some of the most exciting thinkers I've ever encountered are partisan Right-Wingers. Mr. Blankley thinks that more and more people will come to realize the magnitude of the threat of Muslim terrorism, and I guess that if I did, then anybody can. And if he thinks they will, there's a good chance he's right.
Either way, we must pursue it because it may be our only hope.
More when I read the book. In the meantime, I highly recommend that you listen to the call at OneJerusalem.org. I won't listen to the recording because I don't want to hear my own voice, but I know from being there that it was a knockout conversation.
UPDATE: I was late to the call, so initially I didn't know who was there. I've since caught up.
Omri at Mere Rhetoric gets the gold star for doing the best job blogging the call.
Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit agrees it was an excellent call.
Jerry Gordon at Israpundit points us to a Tony Blankley article in the Jewish World Review.
Lynn at In Context found Blankley "outspoken and open-minded" and is glad to have him on her radar now.
Rick Richman at Jewish Current Issues is especially interested in the ripple effects of both the book and the blogs and refers us to this editorial by Blankley on Pakistan's little-known surrender to the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker calls Blankley's analysis "both commonsensical and nuanced... unfailingly informative and clear."
Chad at Grandaddy Long Legs is new to me, but Tony Blankley is not new to him (see this post from June). I appreciate that Chad is very much the gentleman, waiting for me to post before he does, so I don't have to be last :)
And I thank him, too, for this cartoon from his "About" page.
Posted by: Smooth | Sunday, 01 October 2006 at 10:39 AM