Iain Murray at the Competitive Enterprise Institute comments:

“I’ve been following the debate on The Corner and have been struck by the

intensity of the arguments levelled at you. I was similarly nonplussed when

James Q Wilson reacted (overreacted in my opinion) so hostily to my

suggestion last week that Leon Kass may have made an error in judgement.

Why do Brit conservatives always tend towards the pragmatic in moral cases

and why does this annoy American conservatives so? I think Stuart Reid has

an excellent summation of the reason in the new Spectator: ‘We don’t have

the moral intensity of Americans, nor do we have their Manichaean

certainties. In other words, we are not as good as the Americans, but

neither are we as hysterical.’

… (but I

think you need a subscription).

“I think I’m fine with not being as good but being less hysterical. I think

this fits with the fact that I had never heard the expression ‘Don’t make

the perfect the enemy of the good’ until I came to this country. It’s a

very American failing.”

This is very characteristic. One of the stock topics of conversation among

Brit expats in the USA is the weird hysterical strain in US politics. This

seems as peculiar and foreign to Brits and Brit-raised (so I’m going to

include myself here) as the War Dance of the Sioux, and we can’t understand

how it came up in a fundamentally Anglo-Saxon country. The way I look at

it, it’s just the mildly annoying downside of the earnest and passionate

American desire to be good, and to be known to be good. I suppose Brits

want to be good; but they don’t want to half as much as Americans do, and

they don’t give a fig whether anyone else thinks they’re good or not. I

have always thought that the phrase (now extinct, unfortunately) “no better

than she should be,” spoken of a loose woman, is very British.