True Grit?

Campus Report ^ | January 9, 2009 | Heather Latham

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True Grit?

by: Heather Latham, January 09, 2009

Tony Blankley’s new book, American Grit, calls for a change. It is not the same change that is proposed by our new president, but it is change that he argues is necessary for the survival of our nation.

In a Conservative Bloggers Briefing on January 6, 2009, he told of the trouble that America faces: its strength and dominance is fading. His solution? “We need a new nationalism…that our policies, domestic and foreign, have to be focused consciously on what makes America stronger.” He continues, “We’re challenged in a way we’ve never been.”

He says that although he was once a libertarian, he is now willing for a more intrusive government if it will be to protect the nation: “September 11th got me starting to think about how do we maintain our freedoms in a libertarian sense, but in the face of the kind of dangers we face in the world. And I couldn’t fully rationalize it…. I started to think about what do we need to do to protect ourselves from this extraordinary danger…. I was prepared at that point to support more intrusive measures into civil liberties than I would have before then.” He then spoke of his shift from libertarianism to conservatism to nationalism. He points out that nationalism is no longer the same idea as it was in the 17th through 19th centuries. “As I’ve been thinking about the policy…I’m now thinking that there are things we have to do that are not purely consistent, all the time, with simply libertarian [and] conservative principles. And that drove to me to start thinking through, ‘What do we have to do in this country to make ourselves safe.’”...