A nation whose citizens stop thinking, stop debating, stop caring, refuse to learn or listen, this is a nation that sooner or later will cease to be free.

A few months back, a close friend ended an e-mail dialogue in the most abrupt way: he wrote that communicating with me was making him nauseous.

I have been friends with this person for near 25 years (since college) and he has known, albeit without much agreement, that I was conservative. And yet after years of open and honest debate, in the midst of a conversation about the role of the federal government, he lost patience, if not with complete finality (one hopes), at least in such a way as to give offense, purposely, in order to end the conversation.

I have been giving this some thought for reasons beyond the personal. First, I have always marveled at how Bill Buckley managed to remain close friends with people he disagreed with on issues of principle. His friendships have spanned the political spectrum and have included John Kenneth Galbraith, Norman Mailer, and the late Allard Lowenstein, among others. G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw disagreed on just about every substantive matter, but this did not prevent them from making the rounds together in London restaurants and pubs. On the other hand, Norman Podhoretz has written several books — Ex-Friends and Breaking Ranks — that suggest, by their very titles, the difficulties of sustaining friendships across sharp political or ideological divides.

For friendship to survive the rough and tumble of political conflict certain circumstances must be operative. First, the differences must not be so profound as to be beyond the pale. These days, I find it difficult to be in the company of people who use pejorative terms to describe minorities even when this reflects more tradition or habit than malicious intent. Is this a proper place to draw the line in one's private associations? I cannot imagine sustaining a friendship with a member of the Nazi party or the Ku Klux Klan or, for that matter, with a dogmatic communist. Rooted in their approach to life and politics is a violent and racist mentality that is an attack upon the foundations of the social contract that enables societies to exist peacefully. But when you get to some of the political differences raging in our nation today between liberals and conservatives or Democrats and Republicans, we enter a gray area that is more complex and nuanced.

I have often been in the company of people who think abortion must be protected as a right for the sake of women's health and freedom. Because I believe most of these people are well-intended, I would not terminate discourse with them despite my own moral objections to the practice. It is one thing to oppose Roe v. Wade — which I do — but quite another to criminalize or totally outlaw abortion, which I would not support. My problem is with a Supreme Court that wrested the issue from state and local governments and established a right of privacy on which the abortion industry now rests. It denied communities the right to negotiate their own moral parameters on the matter.

My own struggle with the issue is rooted in empirical realities. There are situations that are not easily navigated and that give one pause: rape and incest — particularly involving children; or when a pregnancy seriously endangers the life of a mother or deformity is so grotesque as to deny a fetus any chance at normalcy or happiness. These are not easy questions and I do not pretend to know all the answers. My instinct is to side with those who are pro-life because once we start prejudging who does or does not deserve life, we find ourselves headed toward deep, dangerous waters. Still, people faced with such choices should not be labeled criminals because they cannot find their way to an absolute position.

On the other hand, there are situations when the pro-choice option seems almost hopelessly inhumane. A recent column in the Wall Street Journal told the story of a woman who aborted two of her three triplets because she did not want to compromise her lifestyle and her career. This strikes me as a tragedy and a choice alien to a humane, loving society. I simply cannot grasp how someone given such a gift would set out to destroy it. I would dare say it was a monstrous decision, and one she will one day grieve over once she sees the remarkable child she allowed to survive and grasps what it was precisely she denied herself and her children in the way of love, joy and affection. Could I sit across from her at dinner, hearing her, and not be nauseated, to use my friend's harsh word? Probably not.

War triggers equally strong emotions. Though my own position on the war in Iraq was to support, I never felt the issue was beyond argument. It was a close call, but one I felt could be justified given the history of the Iraqi regime and what seemed to be known by our government and the international community. I can also, in retrospect, understand Buckley's argument that had we known for certain that the regime's weapons programs were as retarded as they turned out to be we might well have deferred this conflict.

Many of those who felt Saddam could be contained without a full-scale military action cannot be dismissed as anti-American leftists. They feared the war would stimulate the appetite for terrorism in many parts of the world; that claim must be tested against reality and Bush and his administration should be held accountable based on the evidence. Still others believe the costs of the war outweigh the benefits: did we merely transfer the suffering from those who would have been Saddam's victims to those who are now the victims of the ongoing conflict? While virtually all of the carnage of the past year is the responsibility of our enemies, not our military, these are not questions I can dismiss lightly. These concerns fall within the parameters of fair and reasoned debate.

I cannot, however, grasp the mentality of those who insist on assigning to the president all kinds of evil motives. Who compare him to Saddam. In refusing to concede that reasonable people could look at the evidence and reach different conclusions, such critics have poisoned the debate and made it difficult to focus responsibly on the real threats our nation faces. And so we have the long litany of leftist conspiracies — that Bush knew about 9/11 beforehand, that his administration lied to drive the nation to war, that concern about weapons of mass destruction was all a ruse to fill the coffers of Halliburton or to assert control over Iraqi oil. Never mind the overwhelming evidence that debunks such claims, those who level such charges cling to their fantasies with near fanaticism in the midst of war and the political passions of an election year. The right has also transgressed — commercials aimed at former Senator Max Cleland in the 2002 elections being a case in point.

The result is the rupturing of civil discourse. Real dialogue is nearly impossible and all you have to do is read the polemical books left and right or watch or listen to the news and talk shows to witness smoke aplenty, but very little in the way of light. It is against this backdrop that friendships have been strained.

The other factor on which civilized discourse and disagreement depend is a generous temperament. Buckley was the master of polite but demanding debate. He swam in liberal-infested waters and learned how to navigate and survive. I have been pretty good myself, actually, at sustaining connections with people who find my politics difficult to stomach. I cut my journalism teeth in college working at the Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. (Why do we need a state zoo, Jesse Helms once quipped, when we can just put a fence around UNC). I rose through the ranks despite conservative leanings and eventually became editor in a campus-wide election. It did not take me long to witness the dogmatism of my colleagues, who, fearful that I might endorse Reagan in 1980, all but threatened a walk out. I even got a phone call from a former editor who urged me to remember the great liberal tradition of the paper. Thomas Wolfe, Charles Kuralt, Curry Kirkpatrick, Edwin Yoder and Alan Murray are among those who served as DTH editor, and the paper was a trailblazer on civil rights issues. I would set the liberal reputation of the paper back years, he pleaded.

I wound up endorsing Anderson both out of a need to survive editorially and because I had doubts about Reagan at the time, though not nearly as severe as my doubts about Carter. And still several members of my editorial board eventually resigned over some political issue or another. This and other experiences taught me a lesson. Contrary to the claims of my DTH colleagues, the right did not have a monopoly on being close-minded and intolerant of independent thinking. Those who refused to entertain conservative ideas not only breathed the chloroform of conformity, they threatened to suffocate all who did not likewise imbibe. To say this deadened them intellectually is not an overstatement. 

In order to survive in a liberal environment (which was the world of journalism, after all,) one had to learn to use humor to disarm otherwise hostile or skeptical attitudes. Just as important, you had to be informed, well read and articulate. You had to overcome the ingrained prejudices of those not likely to give a conservative the benefit of the doubt.  I was something of a quaint oddity in those days — an essayist and reporter, thoughtful, talented even, pleasant to be around, but inexplicably 'infected" with conservative views. I began to wear the designation with a bit of pride — and with Buckley as my example, set out to show that one could be 'right' thinking and still survive a world generally hostile to our worldview.

The key was to argue the issues on their merits and to resist the easy temptation to demonize those with whom you disagreed. This is precisely why Buckley was and remains the best conservative thinker of the past half century — he was not afraid to argue his positions on hostile soil in a tough but fair way. He took opposing views seriously and treated those he debated with respect.  One senses that in many ways he was more engaged by the opposition than by his fellow conservatives. His gift was the ability to deconstruct the flaws in another's argument, and to reconstruct his positions in the face of compelling evidence or counterpoint. I studied his example diligently and got great pleasure in puncturing the conservative stereotype so prevalent among my liberal friends and colleagues.

One of the those who appreciated my iconoclasm and free thinking was the friend I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, a Massachusetts liberal of luminous intelligence and critical skills. We have discussed everything under the sun — from literature and politics to the death of my beloved father. Yet in the midst of the war and his extreme dislike of President Bush, and my own determination to question his assumptions, he could take no more. (Granted, he had just spent the week with his extremely conservative father-in-law, so he might be forgiven a bit of weariness).

The issue that broke off our dialogue is worth exploring a moment. I had written in an essay, which I shared with him, that this election may well be a referendum on the proposition that we either accept that we are a free people allowed to run our own race, or we embrace a nanny state in which the corridors of freedom are inevitably narrowed. Bush has expanded government, and has disenchanted some of his own supporters in doing so, but he at least gives lip service to the notion of limited government (as did Clinton). That is not the case with Kerry or Edwards. Consequently, those of us who would like to keep the state in check might forgive Bush, in a time of economic downturn and national crisis, for exceeding normal limits. But we expect him to right his course and will pressure him to do so. Kerry, it seems to me, is immune to such pressure.

My friend replied that he simply did not buy my argument and questioned my allegiance to the Constitution. 'It's the government's responsibility to serve the PEOPLE, George. I believe investment in PUBLIC education would pay far greater dividends in terms of quality of life that we enjoy than all the defense spending. We're fond of wars: on drugs, terror, etc. So why not a war on ignorance? How about throwing $87 BILLION dollars at public schools, teachers, programs? I wonder if that would make any difference in the teaching and learning environment."

And then he turned to the war, which he opposed not only as an ill advised and unnecessary act of violence, but for its consumption of resources that might have been better used. Finally, this: "I have to wonder if you, of all people, would ask such a question if the founding fathers had declared that the citizens of this country `have a right to bear books,' instead of arms? Ah, but since they did not, well, the government is not responsible for the education of its people? OK, I gotta stop this for a while. This is making me nauseous."

Right up to the last line, my friend had engaged an important question with his usual passion and conviction. Why did it nauseate him, however, to discuss it? Why were my arguments sickening to him? Was it the war that drove him to anger and exasperation? Was it exhaustion or impatience? Was my position beyond the pale or was he simply demonstrating a doctrinaire leftist attitude? Did he really not know that we spend almost a trillion dollars a year on education? Does he really believe that throwing more money at education is going to result in better educated kids? And do we have a right to ask how much is enough? If every good cause warrants government support, it is not difficult to follow the logic to its inevitable destination: there will never be an end to the expansion of government as we all line up to pick our favorite tax-supported cause.

Here was my argument: any tough-minded and curious person with responsible parents can educate themselves far beyond what most Americans have achieved. All you need is a library card and perhaps a little help from a reasonably qualified teacher or instructor. The problem is much deeper than resources. The problem is dysfunctional families and communities and a popular culture that celebrates easy success over hard work, and instant gratification over self discipline. These issues require more than another education program. 

Only our military can provide for our national defense. We can argue about the Iraq war, and we should, but the fact remains that defense remains the single most important responsibility of our federal government. Without a national defense, we would not be free and much of the world would not be liberated. Our mistakes deserve criticism, but our support for freedom also warrants recognition and celebration. The investment in defense, though it must be shrewdly and critically managed, has not been wasted, even if there has been some waste or mistaken priorities.

I have felt it important to discuss substantive points for a reason. Historically there has been an assumption on the left that conservatives are misguided to the point of being beyond discourse. We are not only misguided, we are not very smart. This attitude is rooted in history — conservatives and Republicans have historically been the proponents of business, not social pioneering, the arts or government. That is why Buckley and now others had to create their own venues for talking and writing. Doors were closed to them — to us. We were the stupid people. We were not worthy of being engaged. Read Dwight MacDonald's untempered assault on National Review back in the 1950s or Mary McCarthy's dismissive comments about conservatives, which can be found in her letters to Hannah Arendt. Only by demanding and taking power, as others before them were forced to do, did conservatives get a voice at the table of ideas and culture.

A conservative does not oppose government or even some aspects of the safety net, but thinking conservatives do ask us to remember that the marketplace, however flawed, has provided more opportunity, hope and wealth to more people than any system in history. That is not an achievement at which we should scoff. That does not mean private industry should not be regulated or even prosecuted when it does negligent or malicious damage, but determining the limits of government power is precisely the great intellectual enterprise that has preoccupied thinkers since the Enlightenment. Our government already consumes around 25 percent of our gross national product. How much is enough? This is not — it seems to me — a discussion that is beyond the pale.

One senses things, and my own sense is that certain issues for certain liberals are articles of faith: the evils of the Vietnam war, which to them are beyond dispute, the Iraq war, which is increasingly becoming their new Vietnam, and even the notion that government is not the most efficient vehicle by which societies evolve and improve. Across these divides we seek to communicate and learn.

I am reminded of the great coffee house discussions in which Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke participated. Benjamin Franklin also partook in such discussion groups during the colonial period. It is no less important today that public affairs and intellectual debate not be relegated to the campus or the talk shows. At the dinner table, in the classroom, at social events, and, yes, even among disagreeing friends, lively discussion is the lifeblood of our democracy. It can be done artfully and with discretion. It should be civilized — we count votes, as they say, not bullets. Fostering discourse is healthy. Otherwise, there is no discussion at all, just people screaming the same clichés over and over. And as Malcolm Muggeridge observed, when a thousand people are all yelling the same thing what they are yelling is a lie even if it is true.

Yes, there are subjects more important than politics or policy. Bird-watching with my three year old is far more entertaining than any news talk show on the air these days. But a nation whose citizens stop thinking, stop debating, stop caring, refuse to learn or listen, this is a nation that sooner or later will cease to be free. I was fortunate to grow up in a household and with a father who made discussion a vital part of our education and entertainment. That is why my friend's retort stung. He knew my father and he was not only insulting me personally, he was undercutting something we both know is sacred in our political tradition: an unfettered, open exchange of ideas. I do not despair, however. I suspect I have not heard the last from him.