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• Tuesday, January 6, 2009 07:28 AM

  bamage

  I do wonder, though, if anything you said "got through" to his listeners, or even, dare I ask, Hewitt himself.

  I received lots of email from Hewitt listeners last night. Many were of the "you're-a-coward-and-leftist-pansy" variety that you'd expect, but many were civil and cogent, disagreeing with my basic points but doing so only by thinking about them first.

  People's thought processes are complex. Almost nobody just suddenly and consciously changes their mind or renounces long-held beliefs because they hear one interview. And some people are so irrational, such authoritarian followers, so vested in their tribal identities, that they're forever entrenched and impervious to reason.

  But I think for a lot of people -- on every side of political debates -- being exposed to new facts, or facts presented in a compelling way, can cause those facts to lodge in the mind, infect the thought process even subconsciously, start slowly opening people's views and perspectives (I'm not talking about my Hewitt interview specifically -- just political debates generally).

  We all instinctively want to reject facts and ideas that negate or are at odds with intensely held views that we have, but I think most of us have had the experience of having those kinds of oppositional ideas gnaw and irritate and not go away easily even if we want them to. Along with preventing demonization (the more people are exposed personally to , the harder it is to demonize X), that's what I think is the prime benefit of these sorts of discussions: forcing facts into people's consciousness -- it's partial; it's incremental; it may even be imperceptible. But I do think it can have an impact -- and the more of them, the higher the potential.

  —GlennGreenwald Read GlennGreenwald's other letters
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