Gavin Newsom Interviews Steve Bannon

California governor seems to understand value of talking to the opposition.

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently started a podcast and shocked his fellow Democrats by inviting leading figures in President Trump’s MAGA movement for a conversation. As was the case with Chris Cuomo, I think it’s great that the governor is smart enough to realize that he should talk to his opposition.

Having lived in many left-leaning cities, I have always marveled at how people who define themselves as liberal-minded and tolerant are actually censorious and intolerant of any view that diverges from their own.

In the spring of 2016, I attended a seated dinner at the Vienna Museum of Applied Art in honor of an old artist friend. At the table with members of Vienna’s cultural elite, somebody asked me what I thought about Donald Trump running for the presidency.

“I think it’s great that he’s shaking up business-as-usual politics in Washington,” I replied, “and I’d much rather have him as president than the odious Hillary Clinton.”

I might as well have announced to the table that I was suffering from florid ebola. My date—a former photo model—looked at me as though I’d just confessed to murdering her parents.

Governor Newsom is getting a similar treatment from fellow democrats and even some Republicans. Former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger declared that Newsom’s decision was “unforgivable and insane.”

Kinzinger’s sentiment is expressive of the strange rise of orthodoxy in 21st century America. Many people in the public forum express a dogmatic posture that reminds me of accounts of public discourse during the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries.

This strikes me as very strange. I have always found that the most interesting conversations are with controversial characters who express heterodox ideas.

To his credit, Newsom also seems to recognize that Steve Bannon is vastly more intelligent and educated than anyone on the political or cultural Left. Though Bannon often strikes me as a far out character, he always has something interesting to say about things that he has carefully studied and thought about. He perfectly contrasts with most political commentators today, who remind me of Orwell’s characterization in his essay “Politics and the English Language.”

Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases …. one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy … And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.

Even if you disagree with Steve Bannon about many things, if you have an open mind, you have to admit that he is lively, original, bold, thought-provoking, and often funny. I suspect that much of the Left’s fervent loathing of Bannon is simply the loathing that many ignorant and daft people feel in the presence of an intelligent man.