Remember last June when the panjandrums of the Wall Street Journal editorial board emerged briefly from their gated communities to give us an unforgettable glimpse into the mindset of our nation’s high elites? Remember? Remember how they said that we of “the National Review Crowd” were “foaming at the mouth” at the government’s failure to enforce immigration law?

One of the most bizarre moments in that very bizarre episode was when Daniel Henninger, or whichever giant Venusian mollusk had donned Henninger’s skin for the event, extruded the following observation: “Their [i.e. our] objection is fundamentally cultural, and they can’t say that.”

My reaction to that little gem, which I think I posted to The Corner at the time, was: “Of course it’s bloody cultural, you gibbering fool, and we can say it, and we have said it, and do say it, all the time. Samuel Huntington wrote an entire book setting out the case that cultural objections to mass Hispanic immigration are reasonable and largely unanswerable. Aren’t you guys supposed to have informed opinions?” Or words to that effect.

Well, I found myself thinking of this the other day while reading the Letters columns of The Economist. A couple of issues ago, the magazine, which is pretty much on the same page as the Journal’s expense-account multiculturalists where immigration matters are concerned, ran one of its articles cheerleading for open borders and amnesty. There were some letters in response. Here’s one, from a reader in Seattle, that would have Henninger headed for the mother ship, screaming and flapping his pseudopods.

Sir — A nation has a history, a culture, an identity. Britain is not France, Spain is not Germany, and none of these are Bangladesh or Morocco. Nor do their citizens want them to become so. People do not want to be overrun by foreigners of a strange religion, a different race, or exotic (and sometimes repulsive) customs, even if it means a 1% rise in economic growth. No amount of lecturing will change these attitudes.

The reason a passage like that jumps out of the page at you – from The Economist yet! – is that such plain, commonsense frankness is now rare. Political correctness has advanced so far that to speak of human groups, including the ones we reactionaries still quaintly insist on calling “nations,” in any terms other than those of academic economic theory, is taken to be a sign of gross ignorance, or malign intentions, or mouth-foamy mental unbalance.

This one-dimensional humans-as-economic-units attitude is both arrogant and ignorant – really as crude, illiterate, and insulting in its own way as the mindset of any Bull Connor segregationist. That it is the common ideology of a prestigious group of our intellectual journalists, speaks very poorly of the state of our public discourse, and very revealingly of how our elites regard the unwashed masses.