FOR years, Sheri Langham looked at the Republican politics of her parents as a tolerable quirk, one she could roll her eyes at and turn away from when the disagreements grew a bit deep. But earlier this year, Ms. Langham, 37, an ardent Democrat, found herself suddenly unable even to speak to her 65-year-old mother, a retiree in Arizona who, as an enthusiastic supporter of President Bush, “became the face of the enemy,” she said.

“Things were getting to me, and it became such a moral litmus test that all I could think about was, ‘How can she support these people?’ ” said Ms. Langham, a stay-at-home mother in suburban Virginia. The mother and daughter had been close, but suddenly they stopped talking and exchanging e-mail messages. The freeze lasted almost a month. “Finally, it hit me that if one of us got hit by a bus tomorrow, I don’t want my final thought to be, ‘She supports George Bush,’ ” Ms. Langham said.

This woman is a 37-year-old adult with a child, and she freezes out her child's grandmother over politics. 'Nuff said. (Maybe if she actually asks her mother about her views, and listens, her question will be answered.)

. . . . Silvy Brookby, an algebra teacher in Kansas City, Mo., was once amused by the liberal banter she heard at the school lunch table from her colleagues, and often countered with a Republican perspective of her own. But as the debate has worn on — and, in Missouri, has grown more fierce against the backdrop of a fiercely contested Senate race — Dr. Brookby, 35, said she has grown tired of it. “Recently, I have withdrawn,” she said. “I’ve been like: ‘I can’t do it anymore. Let me sit here and eat my chicken tetrazzini.’ ”

. . . . Bob Schwartz, a Democrat in Columbus, has had a similar, visceral reaction to his Republican friends. He recently quit his monthly poker game after 25 years, he had become so fed up with hearing his Republican partners praise President Bush at every gathering. “It finally got to the point where it was me and another guy who were the only Democrats in there, and we said ‘That’s it, folks, we don’t want to play anymore,’ ” said Mr. Schwartz, 68, who is a retired electrical contractor.

Bob can't stand to play poker with Bush fans even when he has a Democrat pal to keep him company.

. . . . Jim Coffman, 40, a Democrat in Chicago, said he and his wife have not pursued a friendship with another couple whose three children are the same ages as theirs after seeing photographs of President Bush on the other couple’s refrigerator. . . .

You sure don't want your children tainted by the demon children of Bush devotees.

Stephen Viscusi, 46, of Manhattan, said the divide has made dating even more fraught. Mr. Viscusi, who is gay and a Republican, said he has been rejected by Democratic suitors once they learn his political views.

(Gee, I think it's even worse for them than for 40-something single neocon Jewish women in NYC.)

Notice how all the shunning is being done by liberals/Democrats. Given that this is most of the Times declining readership, I don't think the article was weighted to make them look bad. I think Anne Kornblut just couldn't find any examples of conservatives/Republicans doing the same thing.

Some of us discussed this at a party I hosted yesterday evening, to eat chili and pack goodies for the troops in Iraq. An unexpected and welcome visitor was the twenty-something daughter of one couple, who was in town for a visit. She works in an extremely lefty-liberal industry, looks the part, and is matter-of-factly in the closet about her conservative politics. Most of us are in the closet, or we get treated like the people in the article.

We were giddy that our experience had finally become visible to the establishment that routinely trivializes and erases us. We also thought that Kornblut couldn't even tell that she was making her own side look bad.

Maybe Kornblut is an undercover agent for our side.

The article even captures the most irritating behavior, the arrogant presumption that is worse than simply advocating for one's views.

Chris Murphy, 32, counts himself among the few Republicans in Boston, where he works in the media relations department at Blue Cross and Blue Shield. In an environment dominated by Democrats, he said he is consistently amazed at people’s presumption that he shares their views, putting him in more than a few awkward positions.

“People just assume you’re a Democrat, and turn and look at you and say, ‘Can you believe what this nut in the White House is doing?’ ” Mr. Murphy said. “And then you can say, ‘I voted for him twice,’ or you can nod and move along.” Often, he said, he chooses the latter.

“People just assume you’re a Democrat." Boy do they.

Another thing they do which Kornblat doesn't give an example of, but which we all have experienced: They always start political conversations. None of us do. We have learned that no one wants to argue issues on their merits, that the room gets very quiet and unfriendly, that people start screaming at you, or rant the most loopy beliefs and conspiracy theories. We just assume that is not a topic anyone can treat in a dispassionate manner.

But they always provoke political conversations. Well, not conversations, which would be enjoyable and enlightening. They make pronouncements. And look around the room to see if anyone not only doesn't agree, but doesn't agree enthusiastically. As a friend deep in the closet in the theater world put it, you can't just sit quietly and wait for the topic to change. No, you are suspect if you do not vocally endorse the official opinion of the group. You thought you were in a project meeting or a coffee klatch or a dinner party, and all of a sudden it has turned into the Communist Youth League Self-Criticism Session.

And then, after they have assumed, because no one in the room has fangs or horns, that a political support group is what everyone wants (and they do, except for you) - if you express your difference of opinion, they are offended that you spoiled the intimate feeling in the room by being other than they assumed, based on their superficial reading of you. In other words, they brought up politics, but they are the only ones who get to play. If you join in, you are the one who soured the conversation by bringing up politics. Because they weren't trying to start a political discussion, they just wanted to commiserate with friends. You party pooper.

Kornblut consulted an expert, the director of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University:

“An election season can turn into an equivalent of the office party: you will say and do things that you regret the day after,” Dr. Forni said. “And there are those who, being aware of that, simply have decided not to speak about these issues, or to do that with a very, very small circle of trusted friends, very often of the same political persuasion, in order to enforce their values, to validate their choices, because they have given up the hope that anything good will come through political confrontation.”

That describes my life. I even started an email list to create a social life which wouldn't bore or enrage me, which has grown in two years to 140 members who are also looking for a safe place to talk about things that matter to them and trade horror stories like the anecdotes in this article.

None of us likes just talking global issues with those who agree with us. (In fact, we do disagree on the list about many sub-issues, under the general rubric of "hawkish on foreign policy and mostly approving of the Bush Admin's approach to it." Right now we are having a heated online argument about torture.) We would rather have genial enlightening conversations with intelligent people who disagree with us but don't personalize everything and demonize us. But we all have bruises from past encounters with friends, family, and blind dates, and we no longer expect civil behavior. We have made some close friends in our cozy closet, and have a lot of fun, like last night's party. We hope it's a temporary bunker until the hostility dies down.

I know for a fact that I would have had more sex, and maybe a long-term relationship by now, if the social arena was not so polarized. Spirited argument is sexy to me (think William Powell and Myrna Loy), and a marriage with someone who disagrees with me on various issues sounds energizing and playful and always interesting. (I would insert a link to Mary Matalin and James Carville here, but I think Carville is just too weird.) But most people don't feel that way anymore, at least not liberals. Champions of diversity, they want lovers and friends just like themselves.

I know one couple who broke up over politics. (Well, the wife tells me, there were deeper problems, and that just exacerbated them.) But I know several couples who just agree to disagree, and it's clear they are a team and politics is just not a good enough reason for estrangement. (Heed that, Sheri Langham.)

Josh Trevino noticed the same pattern as my friends last night:

The red-blue/50-50 nation thing has been done to death, not least by peddlers of reductionist theses like David Brooks, but that doesn't mean there isn't something to it. This Anne Kornblut NYT piece on the fraying of friendships and relationships between Democrats and Republicans has both the ring of truth and a rather troubling subtext: every person in the piece who actively rejects a friend or family member over politics is a Democrat. This coincides rather well with my own experience, but that means nothing, as no Republican friend is going to eschew me for being Republican. And I have more than a few longsuffering Democratic friends, not the least of whom is my own wife, who continue to tolerate my active espousal of things wrongly abhorrent to them. Bless them all.

Josh has an idea about the disparity in shrillness and tolerance for diversity between conservatives and liberals:

. . . . The conservative view of politics holds that it does not encompass all spheres of human activity. (As an aside, the apolitical realm is not the "private" sphere advanced by the modern left.) There is no sound reason, for example, to reject association with like-minded parents, or friendships with co-workers, or the company of one's own mother, on the grounds of political disagreements. Yet we see emphatic Democrats doing all these things in Kornblut's piece. Why? We can only hypothesize, with the caveat that perhaps, if the tables were turned, Republicans and conservatives might behave the same way toward their family and neighbors -- even if, in the last comparable period, from January 1993 through January 1995, it doesn't seem they did.

A core leftist tenet may be expressed in the old feminist cliché, "the personal is political." This gets muddied a bit by the left's predilection for espousing "privacy," as found in some metaphysical emanation or penumbra of the Constitution; but the net -- and discrete -- effect of this espousal is not a depoliticizing of the "private" sphere. Precisely the opposite: where "privacy" is invoked, it is toward a definite politicized end, be it the legitimization of arbitrary couplings under the rubric of marriage, or the breaking-down of the social structures necessary for the maintenance of a conservative order. In this context, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to maintain relationships with people with whom one disagrees on political or ideological grounds.

There is an internal consistency here, but it's pitiable nonetheless. The spectacle of a grown woman rejecting her own aged mother over their conflicting opinions on the Bush Administration, to take just one anecdote from Kornblut's piece, is at best an affront to piety borne of a monumental lack of perspective. To borrow a non-leftist parallel, one is reminded of Ayn Rand's furious fault-finding with those who dared disagree with her (a peevish trait satirized quite well by Murray Rothbard in "Mozart Was a Red"). But Rand's group was, and remains, essentially a cult. The Democratic Party is not. Or, I should say, it didn't used to be. I've written before on the increasingly cultic aspects of its hard core -- and it's a sincere pity now to read that the phenomenon has metastasized to afflict neighbors, companions, and the rightful claimants to familial love.

if you read this blog you know I disagree with Josh's description of and attitude towards the gay marriage movement, but I think his diagnosis of liberal cultishness is right on. And I know that if Josh and I got to sit down for a cup of coffee - as we kept trying to do when he was in town for the GOP convention in 04 and never found the time - we would enjoy each other's company and have a friendly argument about it. (Hell, Josh had been reading my blog for over a year when he emailed me to let me know he would be in town, and he wanted to hoist a few anyway.) And I know if we each had three kids the same age, he would allow them to play together even if I had an Andrew Sullivan magnet on my fridge.

(Another way to look at this disparity: The left wing of the Democratic Party is trying to purge one of its most venerable leaders, Joe Lieberman, by painting him as a Republican in donkey's skin. The right wing of the Republican Party keeps Rudy Giuliani one of the top five contenders in straw polls for 08. They don't say that Giuliani or McCain and Schwarzenegger aren't Republicans. Nobody is trying to purge them and a surprising number of social conservatives would vote for Guiliani. Thus the Republican Party is a bigger tent than the Democratic Party.) (Dems hate it when you tell them that, but they can't refute it.)

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll links to this post with mighty Amens. (Well this is kind of what PJ Media is about, isn't it? In a mildly under the radar way?) And points us to this example of the kind of discourse we risk when we leave our bunker and expose ourselves to the scrutiny of the Communist, er, Nutroots Youth League Two Minute Hate.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin plays giggly devil's advocate with an old college chum. Thank you Michelle and Bill for demonstrating how it's done. Bitter politicos, take note. (Via Jeremiah)