I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican. Harry Stein
wouldn’t even answer. And she never talked to me again.”
Nor, she adds, was such a thing unique in her experience.
“The people I work with are very caring, but they’re almost all liberals, and to them my beliefs are just incomprehensible. I’ll never forget having lunch in the conference room of the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, right after Giuliani announced he was withdrawing from the Senate race with prostate cancer, and all these people, my friends, are going ‘Yesss, Giuliani has prostate cancer! Isn’t that the best news you’ve ever heard?’ And I said: ‘Tell me, how would feel if it were just announced Hillary has breast cancer?’ They just looked at me blankly, and I said: ‘Enough said.’ From that time on, they never talked in front of me again. I was labeled - and it was my problem, not theirs.”
“Another woman,” she adds, “your typical major Upper West Side liberal, someone I’ve known for twenty-seven or twenty-eight years, actually said to me, ‘Marlene, I know you’ve worked with the mentally ill, so I know you care about people. But how can you be a good person and a conservative?’ It’s sad - we’ve now reached the point where we really can’t really discuss anything.”
On the basis of my random survey, stories of friendships fallen victim to ideology are told by men and women in roughly equal numbers, but they tend to differ considerably in tone. We men generally dismiss our ex-friends, as Norman Podhoretz memorably dubbed his own impressive roster, with bemusement or contempt, identifying them as the jerks they are. “Every time the name Palin came up, his wife would start frothing at the mouth, and he’d follow right along” as one guy says of a recently jettisoned pal. “Why would I even want to stay friends with a wimp like that?” Another, thinking back on the Upper West Side parties he no longer attends, told me, “Every time I’d say to someone, ‘No, I don’t think all criminals are victims,’ or ‘Yes, I do think welfare does harm,’ another jaw would drop, and someone else would accuse me of being a monster. After a while, my reaction became, ‘Okay, fine, these people aren’t my friends anymore. That’s the way it is, and the hell with them.’”
But women, annoying as the fact may be to biology-be-damned feminists, are wired differently, and seem to feel these losses more keenly.
“There’s no question my world has narrowed,” as the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz puts it, with a note of at least quasi-regret, “and my social life has been greatly diminished. I actually used to stay up at night, thinking, ‘I should’ve said this, I should’ve said that’ - like the kid feeling left out. One old friend basically let me know she can’t have me around anymore, just can’t fit me in, because I supported the war. To her, conservatives are all Darth Vaders, planning mayhem and war for the fun of it. And this now included me.”
All of which brings us back to the key question: Is it even possible to be genuine friends with someone who believes that you - or, if not precisely you, everyone who agrees with you - is a vicious, mean-spirited, greedy, bigoted S.O.B.? A bunch of liberal educators have actually created a scorecard that helps provide an answer to this question. Like most liberal initiatives, it is pitched to the mental/emotional level of your average six-year-old - the only difference being that, this time, six-year-olds were actually the target audience, the checklist having been created in reaction to the much ballyhooed “epidemic” of schoolyard insensitivity, once known as “childhood.” Anyway, for our purposes it provides a handy means of grading the performance of our liberal friends in the plays-nice-with-others department.
This being my book, I will take the liberty of handing out the grades:• Good friends listen to each other.
Do yours? Grade: F
• Good friends don’t put each other down or hurt each other’s feelings. Do yours? Grade: D
• Good friends can disagree without hurting each other.
Can yours? Grade: C-
• Good friends respect each other. Do yours? Grade: C-
• Good friends give each other room to change.
Do yours? Grade: F
Then again, who’s kidding whom? It’s not like such friendships have much of a payoff for those on our side of the fence, either. A casual bond with someone in the office or the neighborhood is one thing, sustained easily enough by the occasional give-and-take about the kids, or work, or the latest pop tart to disgrace herself publicly. But if you care as deeply as some of us do about the state of the nation and the culture, how do you remain tight with someone who quotes Keith Olbermann and Paul Krugman, or has no problem with campus speech codes, or can hear America compared to Nazi Germany and feel anything other than utter revulsion?
Old times’ sake being the fine thing it is, we often find ourselves hanging on, even as the returns diminish with each awkward conversation. “The common ground just kept getting smaller and smaller,” one woman says of a once-close friendship. “What to talk about became a real problem - because after a while, we couldn’t even talk about pop culture or shopping without hitting a land mine.”
“We still see each other on important occasions,” says someone else, “but that natural give-and-take is gone, and it’s all very superficial. How can there be a real friendship when you can never be honest or real?”
My wife and I know a couple, Paula and Alex, about which we feel exactly such a sense of loss. Paula and I were friends first, right out of college, when we briefly worked together, and when our respective spouses happened along, we clicked as a foursome. We had a great deal in common - including, back then, the usual gamut of liberal attitudes and assumptions - and over the years they’ve been kind and generous friends. We’ve spent innumerable pleasant evenings together, consulted each other regularly about life and careers, and watched one another’s kids grow up.
At first, when we began to diverge politically, it didn’t seem all that great a problem. Although outspoken about many things and given to hilariously blunt critiques of both the passing scene and many individuals in it, Paula had never been much interested in politics; her husband, while a liberal by birth and inclination, is a gentle soul, given to a bemused live-and-let-live-ism all too rare on the Left.
But at some point they got very chummy with a woman in their extended circle, a fairly well-known old-line feminist, someone who’d actually written finger-wagging books full of terms like “patriarchy,” “heterosexism,” and “hegemony.” Paula, who’d always been blithely indifferent to the raging culture wars, suddenly started coming out with the most astonishing statements of her own.
I can nail almost precisely the time and place when it became clear that the friendship was in serious trouble. It was between 9:30 and 10:00 on a Friday night in February 2005, over dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan’s West Twenties. Somehow, foolishly, we’d let the conversation wander onto the then-current firestorm involving Harvard President and future Obama Lackey Larry Summers and his critics on the left, feminists and their pathetic male fellow travelers. You’ll recall that Summers had committed the unpardonable sin of free and open inquiry by speculating that one of the reasons more men than women are to be found in the upper echelons of math and the sciences might be innate differences between the sexes.
The moment Summers’s name came up, Paula made clear that she did not regard his views as either commonsensical or in the spirit of free and open inquiry. “You know what I wish?” she asked, smiling, as if certain everyone present would agree. “That he would be reincarnated as a woman.”
I caught my wife’s look at that instant, and understood that we’d crossed a Rubicon; she may still have been fond of Paula, but I could see the respect melting away. There followed a brief, intense back and forth, in which we more or less made our feelings known, before both sides backed off in deference to our shared history.
But I know how we talked about that moment on the way home, and, knowing them, have little doubt about how they talked about us. As the philosopher Blaise Pascal once observed, “Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.”