I’m afraid I bristled, reading Jonah’s article, at the mention of “the baser instincts of the public.”

To a lot of liberals, “the baser instincts of the public” covers things like patriotism, reluctance to see your neighborhood taken over by foreigners with unfamiliar customs, unwillingness to pay taxes for the education and health care of lawbreakers, anger at being told that you are a horrible, cruel, and “mean-spirited” person if you don’t go along with the great liberal multi-culti project, the cherishing of traditional attitudes to things like marriage and child-raising, and so on.

I don’t personally regard any of those instincts as base. They seem to me to be normal, healthy, and civic-minded.

I very strongly resist the idea that the American public is a seething mob of ruffians who, if not carefully managed by politico-intellectual elites, will run wild and do beastly things. The Americans I know aren’t like that

at all.