Customer Reviews

American Grit: What It Will Take to Survive and Win in the 21st Century

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Mr. Tony Blankley's American Grit provides a grim reminder of the perilous situation America finds itself in the early 21st century. It also portrays the danger the rest of the world faces if America continues to pursue policies that weaken it and therefore would lead to a far more dangerous world than many of us even want to begin to contemplate.

American Grit is a short 188 page read that packs a lot of thought provoking information into a small book. For example, Mr. Blankley's case to bring back the draft was very well put together and well reasoned. In the past I have dismissed bringing back the draft as either a naïve idea or simply an idea that was brought forth by people that simply wanted to embarrass or hurt former President Bush. Mr. Blankley's argument however has made me think I need to reconsider my previous stance.

The book is broken into the following, somewhat self explanatory, chapters.

1. The Case for a New American Nationalism
2. Bring Back the Draft
3. America Held Hostage
4. Making America Energy Independent
5. In Praise of Censorship
6. A Law Code for Wartime
7. Putting America's Interests First
8. Broadcasting Liberty
9. Back to Basics: Reading Writing and ROTC
10. Conclusion: The Road Ahead

Besides the draft chapter, I found the chapters on censorship and the Back to Basics chapter extremely eye opening. While I understood some of the policies enacted during the Civil War, WWI and WWII, Mr. Blankley gives some astonishing facts that compare starkly with how we are prosecuting the current War of Terror, which I believe should be termed the War on Islamo-Fascism. The Back to Basics chapter on our education system and the lack of patriotism was frightening. In a short half a century, how and what our children are taught has been turned upside down. If this trend continues I believe we will eventually become a nation truly in decline.

American Grit is a book that would be beneficial to the left, the right and the middle in this country. It's a call to action to put America back on the appropriate path of what is right for America.

I always enjoy Tony Blankley's commentary and analysis. He immigrated to America and approaches his citizenship and our country's values with an interesting perspective that can enrich the views of those of us who are native born. When I was a young man I lived for two years in Queensland, Australia and those years abroad forever changed my perspective of what it means to be an American and how we are viewed around the world. Like Blankley, I am a Conservative before I am a Republican. Of course, in this book Blankley rejects even the title of Conservative, Libertarian, Neo-Conservative, Neo-Con (an epithet from the Left), Paleo-Con, or any other already defined group. He calls himself an American Nationalist. That is, he wants policies that make America stronger rather than the perfecting of any abstract philosophy. He sees our times as far too troubled for the niceties of abstractions and wants practical solutions that address the most serious issues we face. He makes his case for this approach in Chapter 1.

He advocates bringing back the draft less because of military needs, although he is for a larger military, but to foster the kind of shared values and culture fostered by the near universal service the World War II generation experienced. He believes America will benefit if more of us sacrifice for her and become invested in her protection.

Like many of us he also recognizes the vulnerabilities we face because of our dependence on imported oil. He wisely exposes the ridiculous promises made on behalf of "alternative energies" and the political agenda behind the global warming alarmist rants. Blankley advocates a sound energy program of more drilling, more nuclear, and more coal. Personally, I think we should make almost all of our electricity from nuclear power.

Blankley also wants a war time censorship akin to what we had in wars past. He doesn't want the New York Times or anyone else exposing state secrets and compromising intelligence programs that have no real public benefit except furthering the paper's left-wing and anti-war agenda. Yes, the author recognizes how complicated the balancing act is between suppressing true sedition and quashing honest political debate and covers this in chapter six, "A Law Code for Wartime".

In chapter seven he focuses on how our national policies should be evaluated on their benefit to America rather than any other political, social, or international agenda. This includes the protection of America's sovereignty and the danger we face through use by the Left of international treaties to erode American independence and Constitutional principles.

Since Blankley's professional expertise is in communications, he has many interesting points to make in using communications more effectively in the way our government engages other governments and how we pursue the principles of Liberty around the world. The author also speaks against the conversion of our schools and universities into propaganda centers against American principles. He uses the battle of the ROTC on university campuses and the Junior ROTC in high schools to demonstrate what is being fought over. Blankley advocates a universal use of Jr. ROTC to help foster American values and counteract the mis-education of our youth.

He concludes with a short essay on the how to strike a balance between idealism and pragmatism and why our times demand that we undertake both in the furtherance of our nation's interests.

Blankley writes with a nice balance of passion and clear thinking that will engage you and encourage you to think about your own thoughts on these vital topics. Please take the time to read this book because American needs to be strengthened now and protected from those who want to remake her in the image of European principles that we fought against and threw off centuries ago. Why take them on now?

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

It was written prior to Obama took office and many of it's predictions have come true. It does explain where we are in these times of "change." After reading it I passed my copy on to a friend...that is the best I can say about any book.

In AMERICAN GRIT, Tony Blankley directly addresses the controversy over where to strike a viable balance between rights and responsibilities. He sees that such a balance historically moves in waves. During times of war that present a clear and present danger to the territorial integrity of the United States(World Wars I and II), he sees a shift toward responsibility and sacrifice. During all other times, the shift is in an opposite direction toward individual rights. This simplistic paradigm he notes has changed due to two reasons: First, the government of the United States aided and abetted by its judiciary, academia, and the media have lurched this country toward the left. Second, the nature of war itself has changed. We are far less likely to engage in the far flung type battlefields of total war that characterized the first two world wars but are far more likely to encounter a never ending series of localized "hot spot" eruptions that feature terror rather than massed force as its impetus. It is the confluence of these factors that he believes represents the greatest danger to America's sovereignty and survival since the days of the Cold War and nuclear exchange. In AMERICAN GRIT, he outlines a series of steps that are not only doable but necessary for our ongoing survival.

Blankley sees the restoration of the draft as the cornerstone to the revival of the security of the United States. His reasons are hardly new, but their familiarity to the over fifty generation does not reduce the need to ensure that as the world's hot spots multiply so will the need of the American military to have sufficient force to fight on several fronts at once. Even now with American forces fighting only in two adjacent countries in the MidEast, we have clearly reached a tipping point. Should the need to fight elsewhere emerge, America may not have the horses to respond. Blankley addresses other almost equally crucial areas needed for American survival. He bemoans the Left's success in reducing America's ability to become energy independent while simultaneously increasing our dependence on foreign oil. He takes an unbiased look at the need to censor the media during time of war. It is with no small irony that he compares the utter ruthlessness of past presidents like Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt to clamp down on seditious writers, editors, magazines, and newspapers during wartime to the almost cavalier censorings of George Bush, whom the left and the media reviled incessantly and grotesquely. As one reads of Blankley's attempts to essentially place the interests of America over the rest of the world, one can sense that the greatest threat to all this comes from the newest occupant of the White House, a man who is bent on placing the United States under the umbrella of a One World Government, one in which the U. S. Constitution will no longer reign supreme. It is to prevent this unhappy fate that Tony Blankley has written this book.

I guess being an ordinary guy from the south side of Chicago I can't be as insightful or highbrow as a lot of reviewers I see here on Amazon. I will simply say that this book should be read by Americans who want to aggressively shoulder the challenges facing our country.

Now I know that will leave a lot of folks out, especially the ones Blankley mentions in his book who hope to benefit from "the politicians who promise the fruits of other people's labor as inducements for votes." Perhaps some of you are discovering that Obama is not the Golden Messiah promised by the 24/7 media emptyheads. He is - as most of us knew who were onto him here in Chicago - another mediocre pol who will say and do anything to get elected and then hope you will forget his campaign promises while he raises taxes and redistributes your earnings. We aren't called the Windy City for nothing. Mike Royko once called Jesse Jackson the Windy City's Windiest Windbag. I think if he were alive today he would agree that Obama has readily slipped into Jesse's well-worn shoes.

When I opened this book I knew Blankley's call for a draft would hit people right between the eyes. I notice several crybabies already were here whining and running for cover behind their Mommy's couch. Relax, willya? He advocates two years of compulsory service, not necessarily in the armed services, but also in various public service positions. Maybe if you had something better to do with your time 41 of you wouldn't be involved in fatal vehicle crashes every day.

With the Democrats help unions here in Illinois have vigorously opposed mandatory public service. Could this could be adding to our state's $9 BILLION (and climbing) deficit this year? But wait until the public pension crisis hits in the next year or so and unions see their benefits sharply cut. Their Democrat pals will be harder to find than a blonde without a cell phone.

Or even worse, perhaps unions will be given full payments assessed to you, the "rich" taxpayer. Just today, our new Dem governor, Obama's close friend Quinn, defined "middle class" as a family of four making $54,000 a year. With pols this out of touch and our economy shaking like a mag 7 earthquake, something's got to give. At least Blankley offers a concrete road map.

You may not agree with all that Blankley has to say, but you can take this to the bank (before it goes bust) - a HUGE shift is coming, and our lives are about to dramatically change. Do your future self a favor, read this book.

Tony Blankley's conservative prescription for America is unapologetic, uncompromising, and a succinct expression of a right-wing aggressive foreign policy agenda complete with a full-on military draft, stricter laws to prevent media from compromising national security, and schools teaching patriotism. It's BUSH WITH ATTITUDE.

Blankley sees himself as a hard-line nationalist and, in a stretch, compares his "nationalist" position to Lincoln's Union-first slavery-second position. And I think the reference to Lincoln was an indirect dig at President Obama, who has been cultivating similarities to Lincoln as part of his marketing strategy, and much of Blankley's book is an attack on what he thinks our new president will do. Blankley assumes President Obama will pursue a left-wing anti-business pro-environmental course which will undermine America's economic competition with rising nations such as China and India. While President Obama's true stance on the issues will most likely reveal itself soon, I'm skeptical about Mr. Blankley's reading of our president. My sense is President Obama is fair, open-minded, intelligent, tough, aware of serious partisan gridlock, sensitive and sharp, skillful politically, and wonderfully non-partisan, but time will tell. Blankley criticizes the president for not being a nationalist, for planning to pursue economic redistributionism. He thinks Obama's foreign policy will be ineffective because it will depend on diplomacy for results (Blankley likes naked force). Blankley is a hawk, blatantly in favor of the Iraq War, and assumes that Obama will steer a course of military retreat (and these last two words are a non-thinking below-the-best partisan attack which doesn't belong in national politics). He sees Obama as emotional and himself as tough, resolute.

So, who's the real Lincoln: Obama or Blankley? It's not Blankley, and the jury is still out on our president. Blankley argues for an even stronger presidency, and this is at odds with intelligent critiques by non-partisan thinkers such as Dana Nelson (see her excellent "Bad for Democracy" which argues that excessive presidential power undermines democracy).

Blankley favors rolling back self-indulgent entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security -- and then he slips in a hard-to-believe disclaimer -- that someday Tony Blankley himself might need Medicare. Sorry, Tony, I'm not buying this. With your book sales, TV punditry, speaking fees, it's hard for me to picture you cash strapped, broke, in a trailer down by the river.

Blankley wants to revive the draft and expand the army. For what purpose? To fight whom? And how much will it cost? This wasn't clear. Blankley's book was published right before the economic downturn of autumn 2008, and a more savvy publisher might have delayed publication for a month to allow the author to reassess his position. Clearly there's no money to pay for an expanded military. He cited the surge strategy as having been effective in Iraq but he avoids any intelligent discussion of whether the Iraq war was worthwhile in the first place. And there is little debate about the merits of a large army versus a smaller, tech-savvy force.

He pushes what he calls a nationalist energy policy. Simply put, we need oil. He advocates eliminating restrictions on oil exploration and repeats the 2008 Republican party's convention chant "drill, baby, drill". He pushes for clean coal, natural gas, nuclear power. He doesn't see global warming as a serious danger. He decries ethanol, correctly in my view, because numerous studies show it's much too costly to produce with negative overall effects. Conservation reduces our oil consumption at the margins and "going green won't cut it" he says. He fears a power shift to petroleum exporting nations and a trend away from free trade in energy. While I have problems with much of Mr. Blankley's overall political posture, Blankley is generally right in his blunt talk about energy. He says what few will admit, and loudly.

But in thinking about terrorism, Blankley picks up on pieces of the problem but fails to see the big picture. He thinks we're at war on terror; therefore curtailment of civil liberties is a reasonable wartime sacrifice and writes that "a temporary reduction of personal and media freedoms is an acceptable price to pay in order to lessen the chance that Islamic fanatics will commit further atrocities against the American people". Nuclear terrorism is a threat justifying the former president's restrictions which he felt were not tough enough. He favors censorship and tougher laws guarding our national security secrets. He feels the media endangers America, as an example, he cited when the New York Times in 2005 published accounts of the National Security Agency's terrorists surveillance program of Americans. He favors a new law code for wartime and despises the idea of giving rights to captured prisoners.

One comment: Tony Blankley is one more American who thinks he understands terrorism. But he doesn't. I do. His prevention strategy is lackluster. My strategy is 100 times more powerful than his confused ramblings AND it's non-partisan. I challenge Mr. Blankley to debate America's terrorism prevention strategy.

Mr. Blankley's foreign policy prescriptions are unabashed BUSH WITH SAUCE. Blankley is forthright, while Bush beats around the bush, so to speak. Sometimes it's better to side with an authoritarian leader, he argues in a realpolitik Machiavellian tradition. Democracy abroad can be against our interests, he says, criticizing some neo-conservative thinkers, and Blankley's criticism is consistent with left-wing critics like Noam Chomsky who describe how the Bush administration came to regret pushing for democracy in Palestine after Hamas came to power. Blankley says: screw international law. He criticizes isolationists for trying to turn the United States into a "giant Switzerland". He doesn't favor turning the military into a tool to hand out humanitarian aid. He decries diplomacy. While I disagree with much of his thinking, I find his candor refreshing.

Overall, a succinct expression of a right-wing conservative hawkish pro-business anti-environmental prescription for America, with much heat and little light, refreshing in its bluntness, provocative without much substance, but I think America's problems are tougher than mindless partisan strategies from right or left, but require serious re-thinking in a Second Constitutional Convention which I have summoned for July 2009 in Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

Thomas W. Sulcer
author of "The Second Constitution of the United States"
(free on web -- google title above + sulcer)

First note Blankley is a nationalist. If the reader notices that the scribblings of Tony Blankley are often quite similar to the rants of the socialist and leftist statist Robert Reich, the coincidence is not merely incidental. Both socialists and nationalists are similar in working for the subordination of the individual to the state. Both Blankley and Reich whine that too many Americans view their country as a marketplace and not some quasi religious entity or community moloch requiring blood and sacrifice.

Then there is the draft. Blankley thinks the military is unable to attract enough soldiers to intervene in all the places he thinks it should. Thus he supports the draft. He mentions a few months where the volunteer army did not get quite the planned number of recruits. But in other months the army and other services succeeded quite well. Naturally recruitment figures vary with the military pay and benefits, the conditions of service, and the general economic and social condition in America.

The strength of the volunteer army is that it attracts the recruits who have the aptitude, skill, and motivation to become more effective soldiers. The volunteer and professional soldiers are more easily and better trained than drafted soldiers and develop greater military skill. Thus volunteer and professional soldiers fight better and take significantly fewer casualities than an army of disinterested draftees.

In regards to history Blankley is confused about the early militia. The militia was called out to resist foreign invasion, suppress rebellion, and help enforce the law. The regular or valunteer army fought in foreign and overseas campaigns such as the suppression of the barbary pirates. The founders of the Republic did not plan to use draftees to fight just any foreign nowin war.

And not only is the draft, as Blankley admits, expensive. The draft is unfreedom. America at its best means freedom.

Perhaps more generally Blankley agrees with Robert Reich that the jihadist terrorist gangs in the Mideast have the same military power and ability to conquer the world as Russia did in its Soviet incarnation. Remembering Soviet nuclear and military capacity the reader can only think surely they joke.

Blankley is actually honest in admitting that nationalism differs from patriotism (p. 6). He also is correct in disputing the global warming hoax, supporting much greater development of nuclear power, and asking for more domestic production of oil in Alaska and elsewhere. Blankley also implies correctly that the education system should teach phonics and basic mathematics rather than be mired in unworkable fads.

However the positive features of Blankley's hyper nationalist rant are vastly outweighed by the malignant obscene antifreedom worship of a state that is essentially an unfree empire. Blankley neglects that America was founded as a Republic.

I agree with Tony. He is a common sense Nationalist and a Patriot.

I found this book on the New York Conservative Web Page [..] and I think it's great.

1)We don't need a draft because we don't need to be at wars!
2)The president has gained waaay too much power.
3)Teaching propaganda in schools is ridiculous.
4)The author is an uneducated warmonger.
5)Buy this book instead: The Revolution: A Manifesto

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" - Albert Einstein. In a nutshell, that is what "American Grit" is all about.

Blankley believes Obama's emphasis on environment sensitivity, questioning free trade, military retreat, and diminution of executive branch powers promotes national weakness. Instead we need a full military draft (males and females), stricter laws to prevent the media from compromising our national security, more power for the president, and greater emphasis on patriotism in the public schools. Blankley is also concerned about a NIE report predicting the end of the dollar's position as the world's primary currency in the next two decades, excessive taxes (noting that only "anemic" Japan has higher corporate taxes), increased government regulation, and sending $1 trillion/year to the Middle East for oil. Finally, he's concerned that Obama's enlarging New Deal and Great Society programs will short-change education, the military, and needed infrastructure.

The problem with Blankley's preferences is that they are what put America in the ditch. A much stronger focus on environmentalism (conservation) would reduce downward pressure on the dollar due to trade deficits, and reduce global warming. U.S. military spending (including Iraq) already exceeds that of the rest of the world, combined; one would think we've already passed the point of ridiculous long ago - spending less would help fund infrastructure. The U.S. has already more than doubled inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending in the last 3 decades, with little or nothing to show for it - cutting back would also help fund environmental and infrastructure investments. Lack of regulation (eg. allowing 30:1 leverage, mortgages to the unqualified, CDS fake mortgage insurance) created the current $1 trillion+++ economic mess we're now in; the problem is further augmented by 18 straight years of large, growing trade deficits that also undermine the dollar. Stay in Iraq and continue to foster terrorism threats.

Finally, as for "anemic" Japan being the only nation with higher corporate taxes, despite it also paying higher factory wages than the U.S., Japan runs an overall trade surplus - including vs. China. (Blankley also forgets that actual corporate tax payments are far less than the posted rates due to offshore tax havens and various other escapes.)

It's hard to believe that Blankley is satisfied with the status quo, so I'm assuming he's expecting different results by essentially doing more of the same. Therefore, "American Grit" is insanity!