Let me get this straight: Iain Murray thinks that Leon Kass should be canned over some trivial offense, and it’s the people who say he shouldn’t be canned who are the hysterics?

It may very well be that Murray’s general point is correct: that there is an element to the American national character that is absent from the British, and that this element is what an opponent of it would describe as a “weird hysterical strain.” It may be that this difference in national character has something to do with the popular vitality of conservatism in America, and its pathetic weakness in Britain.