It is possible I’ve read books worse than Tony Blankley’s American Grit: What It Will Take To Survive And Win In The 21st Century, but it is hard to recall any of them right now. This slim volume – 188 pages of actual argument, large type on every page, ample white space between every line – would make for a very nice present to a very dim conservative who you wanted to play a practical joke on.
   
Blankley is a syndicated columnist who served as press secretary to Newt Gingrich and speechwriter to Ronald Reagan. He is a man who knows quite a bit more about launching political insurrections than I do. Even so, I’ve rarely heard of ideological renewal – much less a strategy for 21st century survival -- emerging quite so haphazardly. Blankley’s vision for the future is the sort of thing that would hardly withstand the rigors of a shoutfest on the McLaughlin Report. Which is fitting, in a sense, because that’s where it comes from.
   
“It never occurred to me precisely where my political philosophy was moving until an appearance on the McLaughlin Group television show a few years ago,” writes Blankley. He goes on to relate a particularly illuminating exchange he had in which McLaughlin demanded to know the agenda of “neo-cons” like Blankley. “I’m not a neo-con,” Blankley replied. “Well, what are you?” asked McLaughlin. What comes next is a direct quote from the book: “With the red light of the television camera focused on me, I paused and thought for a second or two, and then more or less blurted out, ‘I’m a nationalist!’”
   
“That ended the conversation,” recalls Blankley, “but only started me thinking more about my answer. Was it the right answer? Am I a nationalist? What does that mean in America in the twenty-first century?” Are you there, God? It’s me, Tony Blankley.
   
To understand the plight of modern conservatism, you really need look no further than the back cover of American Grit. There, Michael Barone calls Tony Blankley “one of America’s most trenchant conservative commentators and thinkers.” This is a guy who settled on a new ideology in a second of silence on the McLaughlin Group. Only later did he retire to his private quarters to think about it. And maybe he shouldn’t have.
   
Here’s what nationalism means to Tony Blankley. “While I usually fall upon conservative policy prescriptions, my motive is this: What will help America? What will make her strong and safe? My first objective is no longer to find the policy that best fits my definition of conservative, but rather to find the surest path to protecting my country.” (Italics mine.) That’s quite an admission. Long time Tony Blankley fans just learned that back when Blankley penned The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win The Clash of Civilizations?, protecting the country was, at best, a secondary objective to promoting conservatism. Blankley doesn’t dwell on the implications of his personal growth, but it actually serves as a far more brutal critique of the ethos of the conservative movement than most liberals would dare attempt.  

A few paragraphs later, Blankley takes an even bolder swan dive into the deep end of nationalism. “I think of Lincoln’s powerful commitment to the Union,” he says. Fair enough. Lots of people honor Lincoln’s commitment to the Union. But the quote Blankley chooses is…peculiar. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it.”
   
Gutsy choice. A lesser writer might have gone with “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” But Blankley chose this particular moment in American history to yoke his ideology to Lincoln’s philosophical friendliness to slavery.
   
However little time Blankley spent searching for just the right Lincoln quote, he spent even less fleshing out the policy ideas that adorn his book. The problem with defining nationalism as “what will help America” is that you’re suddenly responsible for arguing why your basket of policies will be more helpful to America than your neighbor’s. But Blankley is less an arguer than an asserter. His chapter on “making American energy independent,” for instance, offers a strategy for doing nothing of the kind. Instead, he falls back on statements like “the search for a viable alternative energy already has an air of unreality about it, as if there’s some magical fuel elixir that has not yet been developed because of a massive market failure in the American economy.” This is a man almost proudly unfamiliar with the concept of “scarcity,” and the ways in which rising prices for one commodity render other commodities suddenly, well, economically realistic.
   
Blankley’s lack of confidence in alternative fuels might be explained by the fact that the only alternative he appears aware of is ethanol, and he spends quite a bit of time detailing the fact that increased ethanol usage drove up prices for corn and contributed to food riots (most liberals believe corn-based ethanol an unforgivable boondoggle). Bit of a bankshot, but okay. The key to his argument, however, is a quote from journalist Robert Bryce that’s supposed to prove that even this wonder-fuel won’t end our oil addiction. Congress, Blankley notes, has demanded eight billion gallons of ethanol usage by 2016. But eight billion gallons, as Robert Bryce writes, only sounds like a lot “until you realize that America burned more than 134 billion gallons of gasoline in 2004.”
   
So does Blankley have an answer? Not really. A few pages later, he says that “since alternative energies will nor wean us off foreign oil, our only option is to expand our own oil production.” But no one believes American can subsist off only domestic oil production. Our “most promising untapped onshore oil field,” he says, is in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, “where there is an estimated mean 7.7 billion barrels.” We could burn through that in two years. Then what? Well, nuclear power, says Blankley. And so it goes like this, less a solution to our energy woes than a basket of proposals meant to annoy liberals.
   
The effect is amplified by the fact that Blankley doesn’t bother to address any other problems that threaten America’s survival, or that even seem particularly pressing. He advocates a draft, but it’s an abstract argument. Blankley seems interested in fighting more wars, but hasn’t quite settled on any that appear necessary. His other policy prescriptions – laws against seditious materials, more freedom for talk radio broadcasters, fewer legal rights for suspected terrorists, and a renewed commitment to the ROTC – serve literally no discernible purpose, and he doesn’t make much of an attempt at arguing in their favor (he largely relies on World War I and II analogies, taking for granted the reader’s belief that we live in an equivalent age). They are united only by a soft authoritarianism that leaves the whole effort feeling vaguely poser-ish. Blankley would seem to have given about as much thought to what nationalism means as he gave to defining himself a nationalist in the first place.

Ezra Klein is an associate editor at The American Prospect, where he maintains a respectable liberal blog.