New York Times columnist and former Nixon speechwriter William Safire passed away this week. I did not begin reading The New York Times until after Safire retired his regular op-ed column, but he continued to contribute frequently to The Times through his “On Language” column and occasionally on the newspaper’s opinion blogs, and so I read the news of his passing with some degree of interest and sorrow.

Safire was known for both his political punditry and authoritative pronouncements about proper writing. I doubt I am the only Wash. U. student whose former English teacher distributed copies of Safire’s famous “rules for writers”—valuable edicts such as “remember to never split an infinitive” and “avoid clichés like the plague.”

Yet appreciative as I am of Safire’s passionate commitment to good writing, it is his op-ed column, rather than his linguistic writings, on which I’d like to comment. (As a side note, I normally would have ended that sentence with a preposition rather than using the awkwardly formal construction “on which,” but I think Safire would have disapproved.)

I do not belong to Safire’s political party, but that is precisely why I felt compelled to write about him this week. The Times’ obituary described Safire as “a forceful conservative voice in the liberal chorus” that is the Times’ opinion section. His task was to provide an alternative view, to prevent the Times’ liberal readers from becoming too complacent in their political views.

As much as I cherish Internet news sources for holding both politicians and the mainstream media more accountable to the truth and for providing average citizens an accessible platform from which to express their views, the explosion of news sources made inevitable by the Information Age has also created a very real risk of ideological complacency.

Too often our current sources of information echo our views rather than challenge them. It is far too easy to read or watch only those pundits who make the case for our opinions and ignore those who disagree.

Simply monitoring ideologues on the other side does not solve the problem, however. A committed liberal could listen to Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh every day without ever being persuaded. Extreme leftists similarly do little to convert their opposition.

What we need are the William Safires, the columnists who have definite political ideologies, yet write for a diverse audience (and write well). These are the people who can persuade us, who write eloquently enough to make even their most vociferous opponents take their views seriously, who can push us outside our comfortable ideological hall of mirrors.

Safire is gone, but there are still others like him—too few, perhaps—whom we should seek out when attempting to decipher the political world around us. I will not attempt to offer a list here but welcome suggestions. More important than any compiled list, however, is that we each find ideological opponents who we respect, either in print or even in person, and pledge to continually wrestle with them.