I very rarely pay attention to the right-wing hemiblogosphere, but today I slinked on over to InstaPundit and Tacitus to have a look around, and found a completely different discussion happening than what I'm used to in my usual, lefty world. This is not a conversion story; I disagreed with much of what I read, but was a bit surprised to find nuanced, rational disussions and even some minor dissent from the standard-issue talking points.
This shouldn't surprise me, and when I stop to think about it it's obvious that people who spend this much time talking and thinking about politics have well-formed opinions of their own (however wrong I consider them), but I've been living in an echo chamber, and I don't think I'm the only one. I'm sure that like me, many "Kossacks" (start worrying about your "open forum" when the regulars develop a cutesy name for themselves) expose themselves to mostly left-leaning news sources on a day-to-day basis, and as a result have a somewhat caricatured view of the other side. I'm sure many of the right wing's rank-and-file have a similarly innaccurate conception of who we are and what we believe.
Now, it's late here in Santa Cruz, and I may not be at my most cogent, but here's my proposal: let's inject some actual debate by doing a blogger exchange (like an Exchange Student program, or a prisoner exchange if you're feeling militant) between prominent blogs from the Left and Right.
Let each blog's community or moderator elect or otherwise pick a representative to the other side, who will be given guest blogger status on the "opposing" site in exchange for a reciprocal arrangement. Set some ground rules to limit abuse (limited number of posts per day/week, some general guidelines on flaming and decorum; I think we could all remain civil) and we have a great way to encourage crossover discussion between people in each group's "base", which is just as important for the long-term political health of this country as convincing the apathetic majority that our side is right for just long to win an election.
Another advantage: fact checking. Every group has kooks who are perfectly willing to inject questionable information into a debate. When everyone in the group has the same goals, it's too tempting to just pass this bad information along as fact because it fits so nicely with the group's worldview. This can easily lead to disinformation becoming "accepted fact" as it's passed up the chain of trust from the originating crank to a respected poster. Having opposing views in the mix would drastically reduce this muddying of the waters by exposing claims to people who are interested in proving them wrong. Imagine if the mighty Kos himself could publish corrections and clarifications on InstaPundit's front page! Imagine if we stopped preaching to the converted and started talking to people who substantially disagreed with us!
So, what does everyone think? Is this workable? If the barrier between Left and Right wing forums were more porous, would we be able to hear anything over the screaming? Any thoughts on the specifics of implementing this? Am I up way too late?