THE TOWN WHERE we live, the New York suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, is as attractive to the eye as its name suggests-a leafy hamlet, with spectacular river views and a little downtown area largely unchanged since the Fifties. When my wife and I, looking for a place to raise our two young children, came upon it almost twenty-five years ago, we couldn’t believe our good luck. A mere half hour from the city, it had the neighborly charm of the classic small town. Back then, it seemed every fifth car bore the same bumper sticker; although, in our urban cynicism, we privately smiled at the hickish boosterism, we fully endorsed the sentiment: “Hastings is a neat place to live.”

      In most ways, it still is. There’s fireworks by the river every Fourth of July; the Farmers Market all year round; the sounds of kids sledding in Hillside Park on snow days; the crack of aluminum on Clincher softballs summer Sundays (guys like me, deluding ourselves we can still play, have a fiercely competitive over-40 league); there’s the fabulous library and an ever-enterprising local historical society. Crime is low and civic morale high.

      Then there are the people. As always, it’s almost impossible to stop in at the Center Restaurant for a ham and cheese on rye and not run into two or three or four people you know. Wandering down the aisles of the A&P, you’re apt at any moment to find yourself catching up with someone about the kids, or bemoaning the stupidity of the Mets front office, or speculating about the new shop going in where The Office Ink used to be. How does the song go? “I love those dear hearts and gentle people, who live in my home town”?

      But a word of warning: Don’t get onto politics. If you do, things between you and the dear heart and gentle person before you are likely to change.

      To say Hastings is liberal is like saying Saudi Arabia is Muslim. While there are relatively few outright lunatics, there are enough lunatic fellow travelers that fitting in means accepting a lot of lunatic norms. In this and other ways, we are a suburban version of Manhattan’s Upper West Side - the very area from which many of my neighbors decamped in settling here. (Okay, so did we.) The place is chock full of mainstream media types, therapists, executives of do-gooding foundations, environmental lawyers, and, last but hardly least, the creative set - writers, actors, photographers, directors, set designers, and so on. The town takes great pride in these creative types, in many cases justifiably, but it must be said that they’ve brought with them the same love of intellectual diversity for which the Upper West Side is so renowned. To sum up: The hyperventilating leftist madman Keith Olbermann grew up in Hastings, and, boy, would he ever fit in these days!

      To the casual observer, this might not be immediately apparent. The vast majority of my neighbors are too busy living their lives to waste much time on politics. They vote Democratic for the same reason they watch their diet and floss their teeth - it’s what smart, responsible, healthy, forward-thinking people do.

      That is to say that when, at a neighborhood gathering, one of these people suddenly learns that your views deviate from everyone else’s on the war, affirmative action, big government, feminism, Jimmy Carter, the environment, multiculturalism, sex education, the reliability of The New York Times, the scariness of evangelicals, or (hell, fill in the blank), his or her face will register stunned surprise and deep confusion. You can almost see the wheels turning within and hear the electronic drone: Does not compute . After all, in most ways you seem reasonable; your knuckles don’t drag the ground. Yet the things coming out of your mouth sound so wrong - almost conservative. Which, as everyone knows (without actually knowing anything about it), is just another way of saying warmongering, racist, homophobic, not to mention terminally uptight and ready to wipe out every last polar bear for the sake of Big Oil.

      But such a person will not hate you.

      In fact, few such encounters end badly. After all, you, the conservative, are also a neighbor, and you otherwise get along fine. So the confused liberal will simply change the subject or, at worst, after an awkward pause, excuse himself to get something to drink. What will not happen is an actual exchange of ideas, since, by definition, your ideas (even if they were to be accorded that lofty status), are bad and dangerous.

      But, then, there’s another kind of liberal you’re sure to run into, the fierce and angry lefty partisan, fairly dripping with contempt for everything you are and represent. These are far less numerous - over my more than two decades in Hastings, I’ve had no more than a dozen encounters with such people. Yet each encounter has been, in its own special way, memorably unpleasant.

      I had a couple of such incidents during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Palin Derangement Syndrome took an especially brutal toll on local women. Then there was the one that occurred in the supermarket, around the time the controversy about waterboarding was at its height. I was on the checkout line, behind a huge bearded guy I knew slightly, because his son had once played on a baseball team I coached. So I nodded.

      I could see him hesitate. Suddenly, he spat out: “You people disgust me!”

      “Excuse me?” I asked, startled.

      “You Bush lovers!” he said, his neck muscles starting to work and his face going crimson. “All that bullshit you put the country through over a little lie about sex, but you have no problem at all with torture!”

      Of course, the guy had no idea what I thought about Bush (which happened to be not much), or torture, or anything else, and his pegging me as an Administration bitter-ender could not have been more off-base. But he knew I’d written a conservative book, so what more did he need?

      There are assorted theories