OPINION:
I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M SITTING NEXT TO A REPUBLICAN: A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR CONSERVATIVES MAROONED AMONG THE ANGRY, SMUG, AND TERMINALLY SELF-RIGHTEOUS
By Harry Stein
Encounter, $25.95, 250 pages
Reviewed by Windsor Mann
“To write a tract,” H.L. Mencken said, “one needs but leisure, a grouch and a platitude.”
By this standard, Harry Stein overachieves in his new book, ” ’I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican’: A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous.”
The book purports to be a survival guide, but it is nothing of the sort. Indeed, if it helps anyone survive, that person’s survival is not desirable for humanity.
The author, a conservative convert, abandoned liberalism but kept his proclivity for taking offense. Mr. Stein is peeved because, ever since his move to the right, dinner parties and neighborhood jamborees just haven’t been the same.
To be friends with Mr. Stein nowadays, you have to loathe Keith Olbermann and Paul Krugman, not only know what campus speech codes are but also oppose them, and find it totally normal to have doormats with the faces of political figures printed on them.
The book is full of anecdotes, many of them dull, pointless and sometimes embarrassing even to read. The chapter on finding romance via Match.com is one example. An anonymous friend of the author’s, “a recently divorced middle-aged guy” (form a queue, ladies), is having trouble finding love online, and clearly his fondness for Ronald Reagan must be the reason. “It’s a nightmare,” he says. “There’ve been several women who immediately stopped writing after I admitted I vote Republican.” (One suspects there is more to the story than his love of tax cuts.)
Mr. Stein, though a conservative politically, quotes liberally. He quotes Brad Silverbush, a New York City landlord, for seven rambling pages. (“Once I turned on the tape recorder, it was as if I’d simultaneously hit his start button.”) An anonymous posting about social work on an Internet message board is enough to garner its own chapter. An excerpt of a mundane dinner conversation among San Franciscans drags on, inexplicably, for nine pages. It was “edited for space,” the author tells us unironically.
The book is hard to categorize. Its point is not to enlighten but to complain, and chances are that most readers have heard or uttered these complaints before.
The book is accusatory and self-pitying — two things everyone loves to be but not to be around. For a conservative author, this presents a tricky dilemma: How to complain about liberals without sounding like a liberal, which is to say, whiny? How to protest without being a “protester”? How to accuse liberals of bullying without sounding like a guy who wears Spandex and turtlenecks simultaneously?
Mr. Stein’s mission is to lay bare the “intolerance of the ostensibly tolerant” and “the increasingly illiberal world of orthodox liberalism.” His mission is accomplished simply by stating it. Ergo, he invariably takes a formulaic look at an unsolved non-mystery: the annoyingness of liberals in liberal hot spots like New York and California.
To grumble about the inelegance of Manhattan liberals is to argue a case that has long been closed. From a marketing perspective, it probably is a mistake to tell people in advance that you are about to tell them things they already know, but this is precisely what Mr. Stein does. He warns on Page XVII: “This book is not only about, but also expressly for, those who already know exactly what I’m talking about.”
With nothing new to say, he goes looking for confirmation of his views, and he finds it easily. Bernard Goldberg, author of “Bias,” gives us this line: “You know the movie ’Sleepless in Seattle’? These people are Clueless in Manhattan.”
Sometimes you can’t help but suspect that the author’s primary motive in writing the book was simply to get it done. Many of the pages seem to have no other purpose than to be filled with words. Why else quote so excessively people who have nothing to say?
One story, resurfacing in various guises and with different proper names, seems to occupy half the book. It goes something like this:
Jeremy Daniels, a conservative friend of mine in Minneapolis who saw the light and became a Republican two years ago, told me, “It’s funny. When I’m at a dinner party and I tell people I’m a conservative, their jaws drop and they look at me like I’m a Viking — and I’m not talking about the football team!”
With so many anecdotes like this one (which I made up), the entire book feels like one big “you had to be there” story.
When not quoting his friends, Mr. Stein tries to prove his funniness, as evidenced by his repeated claims that he is funny. He recounts a dispute in which he tried to persuade his (liberal) father to read his 2000 book, “How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace).” “You won’t agree with a lot of it,” he said, “but at least it’s funny” (emphasis original).
He mentions a speech he gave in Dallas in which he, as he says, “began by reading from my book’s back cover” and, in so doing, “got the usual laughs.” Among other things, this is on the back cover: “Someone’s going on about how fantastic San Francisco is, and it suddenly hits you that’s the one place on Earth you never want to live.”
Mr. Stein’s gripes are not political but social, and his problems are, for the most part, problems worth having. To be troubled by dinner parties is to be troubled very little.
Windsor Mann is the letters editor of The Washington Times.
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