I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican. Harry Stein
avoid land mines. But what mattered most, the ease that comes with the certainty of shared values, is irretrievably lost.
Only here’s the thing: In recent years, individually and as a couple, we’ve forged a variety of new friendships. Just about my favorite few hours every month are the ones I spend over lunch with my fellow contributing editors at City Journal, the quarterly of the conservative Manhattan Institute, trading thoughts, kibitzing, and occasionally having at each other, on politics and policy. It’s a great comfort to know that no matter how much we might disagree on waterboarding or the utility of vouchers, those differences pale beside our shared bedrock beliefs and principles. “That’s the lifeline, people who are on the same page,” Kay Hymowitz, one of those new friends, sums it up, “people who don’t make you feel” - she laughs - “weird.”
“What really struck me is the intellectual environment I found on the right,” adds Marlene Mieske. “I can sit around with other conservatives, and know that even if I say something they find outrageous, I won’t be ostracized - I’m still family. As a former liberal, I can’t tell you how refreshing that is.”
What’s especially satisfying, and more than a little startling, is how many of my oldest friends have made the same intellectual and moral journey from left to right as I have. Among these is a guy named Cary Schneider. We met way back in journalism school, when we were twenty-one - slightly younger than our sons, close friends themselves, are today. Cary and I talk at least three times a week, everything from baseball and work to politics and movies. Though there’s a lot of kidding around, it is all undergirded, as it always has been, by a double-wide-load of common assumptions. Only now these assumptions have largely to do with the lunacy of our former creed, liberalism, and the incalculable damage it has visited upon the land.
My wife has a friend like that, too, a woman named Jenny, with whom she grew up in Northern California, and likewise went to Berkeley, moved east and, glory be, also ended up on the Right and largely isolated. She and her husband Gerry live in a small Connecticut town a couple of hours away, and late on Election Day afternoon, we drove up there to wait out the coming storm together. Except it never came - never, at least, penetrated the walls of their home. We sat up late before the fire, bellies full of braised short ribs and mashed potatoes, wine glasses in hand, talking, interrupted only occasionally by their teenaged son, who was monitoring the TV. Gloomy as his reports were, among such friends, things didn’t seem nearly so cataclysmic. The women reminisced about the Monterey Pop Festival, where as teens they both worked shepherding zonked-out rock legends to their hotels; Gerry, who teaches English at an inner city vo-tech high school, told mesmerizing stories about his battles with administrators to teach Shakespeare instead of the Alice Walker and the rest of the P.C. crap on the approved list, and how, once he won, the kids blossomed in their belated exposure to the Bard.
Then, briefly, the spell was broken. “I already arranged to take a sick day tomorrow,” said Gerry. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to stomach the other teachers’ gloating.”
“Oh, c’mon,” snapped Jenny. “Londoners survived the Blitz, we’ll survive this.”
“Gosh, Jen, I wish we lived closer together,” cut in my wife, going sentimental. “You, us, Cary and Lucy, Kenny and Carol. . .”
“A commune!” Jenny laughed. “There’s a hoary old idea that’s come and gone.”
“And maybe should come again, for conservatives, under Obama.”
We all laughed. But at that moment, the idea didn’t sound half bad.
Dinner Party Mischief
OR, HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE NO ONE, BUT HAVE FUN DOING IT
SINCE THERE IS an approved left-of-center stance on everything from taxing the rich (good) and nuclear energy (bad) to Jon Stewart (hilarious) and global warming (settled science; more proof of humankind’s awfulness; my God, what about the polar bear?!), liberals always know exactly what they should think. The catch is that there are certain issues on which, for many, the approved position is quite a distance from what, privately, they do think.
This can provide all kinds of amusement for the enterprising conservative at a neighborhood dinner party or barbecue.
For many years, the number one cause of liberal psychic dissonance was crime. Often the mere mention of an especially brutal rape-murder by a recently paroled thug was all it took to set liberals to disagreeing amongst themselves. Welfare - that is, its clear role in promoting dysfunction - was also good. (Note: For maximum effectiveness, it was important to use the term “well-intentioned” in this context, since liberals like not only to be absolved of responsibility for their own foolishness, but also to be praised for it.) Finally, for a time, before Bush Derangement Syndrome took hold, there was 9/11.
These days, there is no issue more likely set liberals at each other’s throats than affirmative action, since most liberals know as well as we do that racial preferences are a scam; the trick, given their terror of being called racist, is getting them to say so. A quick anecdote - say, about some local white kid whose doctor mother happened to have been born in Argentina being admitted to Yale as an Hispanic - is often enough to get things rolling. With luck, one of them will bring up that, while Obama officially supports preferences, he doesn’t want his own kids to benefit from them; and remind everyone of Martin Luther King’s admonition that people ought “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” so you won’t have to - though it will almost surely be left to you to let drop that JFK abhorred racial preferences, whereas Richard Nixon supported them.
I’m proud to say that one evening, a couple years back, I actually helped engineer the following delightful exchange (dialogue not all that far from verbatim).
ANGUISHED LIBERAL GUY: I’m just not sure it’s right that the kids of this African-American lawyer I work with, who has more money than any of us, should get an advantage over the kids of a West Virginia coal miner.
ME: Or the kids of Vietnamese boat people. [Blank stares all around.] Because, as I’m sure you know, Asians aren’t eligible for affirmative action. They’re classified as an “over-represented minority.”
ADAMANT LIBERAL WOMAN: Well, I’m sure there are problems, but black people still need it. It’s their turn.
ALG: That’s easy to say, but what if it’s some less qualified African-American kid getting a place at a college instead of your daughter?
ALW: I’d want the African-American child to get the spot, so my child will personally experience just a tiny bit of the unfairness they’ve had to suffer for centuries.
ALG (disbelieving): Right, let’s talk again when that happens.
My favorite tale in this vein is from a friend of mine in the left-of-center bastion of Park Slope, Brooklyn. She reports creating not so much anger as level-red discomfort when the talk at a recent party turned to gay marriage. Everyone was for it, of course, including my friend, more or less. “But wouldn’t it bother you if your own children were gay?” she asked, all innocent curiosity. “After all, isn’t it natural to want your kids to mirror your experience? To have a traditional marriage and raise children in the traditional way? I can’t think of anything that would make them more foreign.”
She reports that, hearing this, the liberals around the table “got very flustered, because of course they feel exactly the same way. There was a long silence, and then someone said, ‘I would be much more upset if my kids were Republican,’ and that let everyone off the hook. But afterward, one liberal friend came and whispered in my ear, ‘I would be really devastated.’”
If You Can Take It Here, You’ll Take It Anywhere
ONE INTREPID NEW YORK CONSERVATIVE REFUSES TO BEND OVER