I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican. Harry Stein

       INTRODUCTION

       Notes from the Belly of the Beast

      THE PHONE CALLS and emails from fellow conservatives started coming early on election night 2008 and continued well into the next day. Some were anguished, some merely fatalistic. But even most of these featured at least a dollop of gallows humor.

      “Just thought I’d check in before I went out back and slashed my wrists,” went the message on my answering machine from my friend Ron, who’d recently moved from New York to North Carolina seeking a change of political climate. “What a bloodbath, huh? Our country and the world are about to be cast into ruin. Talk to you soon.”

      My friend Gerry, up in Connecticut, couldn’t help venting about the disgracefully in-the-tank-for-Obama media. “They dealt with every story potentially damaging to Obama like it was Rasputin. They didn’t just bury it; they shot, poisoned, and drowned it!”

      Then there was my friend Cary, who, as the dimensions of the disaster became apparent late on election night, announced he might have to skip work.

      “For how long?” I asked.

      “I’m thinking a year.”

      Who could blame him? Obama may have been a multimegaton disaster in waiting, an unprecedented mix of radicalism, ineptitude and arrogance, but at least back then he was trying hard to make open-minded noises. In Manhattan offices like my friend’s, his many fans usually didn’t even bother pretending to be civil where conservatives were concerned; we were, quite simply, despised.

      Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the token conservative on “The View,” was among those who made the mistake of going to work the morning after. “I fought hard on the other side, but today is a victory for this country,” she graciously allowed on the air. “I haven’t felt this good throughout this entire election process.”

      “So what you are saying is I was right all along?” sneered Joy Behar in response.

      My friend John Leo forwarded the missive from one Blue State blogger summing up what Behar surely wishes she could have said out loud: “AAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAAHAAAAA!! He’s dead, it’s dead, the Republican beast is fucking deaaaaaaaaad!! Eight years of that rampaging Republican fucking elephant beast finally brought to its knees! Yes, you’re dead, you fucker, you fuck, you fuck, you’re DEAD! DEAD! DEAD!”

      Of course, there are those who’ll argue that the authors of such remarks are the hothead fringe of the vast, untidy American left - the modern liberalism’s equivalent of the leather-lunged townsfolk in old Westerns shouting, “What’re we waitin’ for, let’s string ’im up!” Most liberals, they’ll say, are far more levelheaded than that.

      And they’re absolutely right. Ordinary liberals are the ones in the mob who, upon hearing the hotheads’ bloodthirsty cries, mumble for a second or two and then go along with the plan.

      This book is about those who are not part of the mob at all, the conservatives living and working among such folk - and, more than occasionally, the ones getting lynched. They are the good guys in this story. Think of them as Gary Cooper in High Noon, strong, independent, and ready to risk their lives (okay, sometimes their careers, and always a nasty aside) on principle.

      Indeed, their very day-to-day experience reveals how utterly deformed is the current version of liberalism. It presents stark evidence of the extent to which a philosophy predicated on freedom of thought and openness to varied perspectives has become a wellspring of intolerance and rancor.

      Here, for instance, is just a tiny, tiny sample, courtesy of The Huffington Post, of how liberal New York Times readers reacted to the news that, in a touching bid to recapture a bit of its vanished credibility as a somewhat evenhanded journal, the paper would be running a weekly column by the conservative eminence William Kristol on its op-ed page.

      • Worthless suck-up Kristol should be cleaning toilets in public restrooms for his GOP “friends.”

      • I will never, ever, buy another issue of the newspaper, I will never again be a subscriber to your newspaper, and I will do my level best to avoid any purchases from any New York Times advertiser.

      • William “the Bloody” Kristol is a beady-eyed warmonger....

      • If The New York Times is going to hire a liar and a racist like Bill Kristol, then they might as well hire Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, and Ari Fleischer.

      • Kristol is an arrogant, warmongering prick. I can’t stand the sight of him.

      • Just what The New York Times needs, another stenographer for the right-wing slime machine.

      • Listening to Kristol, that warmongering crater-face, is worse than listening to Bush, Cheney, and Richard Perle all rolled up in one.... I hate that decision and I will do everything I can to discredit this decision until they finally flush him down the toilet like the turd he is.

      Not to worry. Exactly a year later, when Kristol’s contract was up, the Times unceremoniously dumped him.

      To be sure, the conservatives I’ll deal with herein are difficult to pigeonhole. They - okay, we - are a diverse lot. Personally, though an out-and-proud libertarian conservative, I actually remain a registered Democrat, partly because of inertia, mainly because the GOP has long been so pathetically off base or weakkneed on many of the issues I care about, from government spending to affirmative action. Besides, as a New Yorker, I want my say on primary day. (That’s when my wife and I work our own private Operation Chaos - voting for Al Sharpton whenever his name appears on the ballot and otherwise doing our modest bit to mess with the party’s head.)

      While by definition, almost every conservative getting by in the alien environment of Blue State America is blessed with independent judgment and a fair amount of backbone, a working sense of humor doesn’t hurt, either. How else to deal with the stuff that at any time can put a crimp in an otherwise fine day - the angry old lady with the antiwar sign affixed to her walker, the PETA zealots from the nearby campus, or the random leftist idiot at a dinner party, waxing self-righteous and quoting George Soros? Or, yes, yet another Obama diehard bellowing that all opposition to The One is rooted in racism?

      One friend of mine recalls being interrupted by an infuriated fellow shopper on Broadway in the 80s. She’d overheard him speaking approvingly about the war on terror to a friend. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this - and on the Upper West Side!” Then, he recalls, laughing at the memory, “she fled in terror, as if looking for a commissar to report us to.”

      The fact is, in key ways, those of us living and working among such people often know them better than they know themselves. Unable as we are to avoid the media they take as gospel - NPR, the networks, The New York Times or its local equivalent - we’re on intimate terms with their most passionately held beliefs and convictions. We know who they admire and who they self-righteously deplore; we know in advance how they’ll react to every controversy, every utterance by a public figure; we anticipate, politically and public policy-wise, their sighs, their frowns, their ups, their downs.

      Existing as we do in both worlds - leading, as it were, double lives