Blaska and Me

Conservative commentator David Blaska and I have one thing in common in addition to a first name. We don’t mind angering our friends.

Blaska wrote an oped this morning in the Wisconsin State Journal explaining why he’ll never vote for Donald Trump again. His argument was strategic more than anything: Trump is a loser who will drag down the party with him. But he also didn’t go easy on Trump for his part in the insurrection, being a sore loser and his myriad self-inflicted legal troubles.

“One can question the civil court decision finding the man liable for sexual assault and defamation. (I do.),” Blaska wrote. “But no one says this sure doesn’t sound like the Trump we all know. How many criminal indictments loom on the horizon? Do you really want your child to grow up to be like this president?”

Blaska’s criticism of Trump, which isn’t new, has earned him the enmity of his tribe. He has cultivated a mostly hard-right following that cheers him for saying out loud the politically incorrect things they’re thinking or saying only to their closest friends. But the downside of that is that it’s also a readership and a clan that doesn’t tolerate dissent from the party line. It doesn’t take much courage to preach to the choir, but it does take some guts to tell them that they’re singing off key.

What we do here at YSDA is a little different. By now I’ve probably chased off most of the hard-left tribe. If you’re an orthodox liberal you’re off reading John Nichols. Blaska is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican who now and then speaks truth to the true believers. I’m a sometimes liberal, more often moderate Democrat apostate who doesn’t go more than a day or two without writing something heretical. Just in the last couple of weeks I’ve written in favor of keeping the Line 5 oil and natural gas line in place and in support of Speaker Robin Vos’ criticism of the UW’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. On the other hand, I’ve often written in favor of more gun control and I’ve mused over whether liberal Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson might make a good governor.

So, in a way, I have less at stake than Blaska. Because I don’t have a lot of strong ideologues in my readership to begin with I actually have less to lose by writing things that might be offensive to one group or another. It’s hard for me to offend people who don’t read my stuff. And, since I don’t count on this to make my living and since I have no remaining political ambitions, I feel free to write whatever I want. If you don’t like what I wrote this morning, well, I’m like the Wisconsin weather. Wait a day.

I had a reader take me aside the other day to make the point that I could be more influential as a voice of moderation if I wasn’t so much like Blaska. His perspective was valuable. I hadn’t given that much thought mostly because I don’t think I am much like David. He’s an unapologetic partisan and he writes with a lot more bite and panache. His website features a picture with his face pasted in over Prince William on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. You’ve got to appreciate a guy who doesn’t take himself all that seriously.

In any event, what I respect in a writer — whether I agree with him or not — is someone who’s willing to write what he thinks and doesn’t give a damn about how his readers or anyone else will respond. In that, yeah, I think Blaska and I have something in common.