Ann Coulter was shocked when she tried to speak in Canada. She had thought American Universities were bad, but the howling mob that greeted her in Canada was something else. Before this a professor at that same Citadel of Free Speech had warned her that she might end up in prison under Canada’s Hate Speech laws.

Yes, Virginia, it really IS different here.

There is a basically genetically different American population. In 1955, the last time it was allowed, it was estimated that over fifty percent of the blood of white people came from people who were here before the Constitution. And at the time of the Constitution, “we the people” had a higher percentage of native-born whites than we have ever had before or since.

Today this percentage is probably about the same. Why? Because areas of heavy immigration at the end of the last century have not been having children. This may seem strange given the idea that Catholics have endless number of children, but that has not been true for some time.

If you have an idea what the word “Catholics” means today. Names in the Northeast do tend toward “Catholic” names, Italian or Polish, but precious few of them are still “Catholic” in this sense. They belong to Mommy Professor, not the Pope.

Population in the “blue” states is dropping like a rock. Thee is no way to be sure, but I have a feeling that the population descended from the pre-1787 Americans is still in the habit of having more than one child, often three or more.

How does this relate to Ann Coulter’s shock in Canada? It has to do with the population only Eric Hoffer ever talked about, the Americans who in his day resided in what was called “flyover country.” I understood what he was talking about, but you can get lost in definitions.

Hoffer said that the Kennedys were loved in Europe because they were Europeans. New Englanders generally are. There is no difference in the thinking of Canadians and the thinking of Brits.

There is no difference in the thinking that dominates the “blue” states and the thinking of Europeans.

If you don’t understand that, I’ve lost you.

Michael Novak wrote the book Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics in which he coined the word WASP, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I had lunch with him once and pointed out that I got along with “ethnic” Catholics, who actually often chose me to speak for them, better than I did with New England WASPs.

I pointed out to him that what he meant by WASPs was “Yankees.” HE AGREED. But Novak is a theologian, and therefore a psychopath. He had not the slightest difficulty in admitting he had lied because he could not have been published if he had said the real thing.

I was able to speak for the “ethnics” because by and large the ones who went to college have gone from total obedience to the Pope to total obedience to Mommy Professor. The steel workers and Southies I dealt with had become Americans.

Meanwhile a major portion of “ethnics” and “WASPs” had gone to college and became Europeans.

I wonder if readers understand what I am talking about.

This understanding which no commentator would understand — if he did, he wouldn’t be allowed to commentate, as Novak well understood — is the basis of the politics of the last half of the twentieth century.

What elected Reagan was the old combination, Southerners and Northern Irish and Italians and Poles, who moved from being the base of the Democratic Party to the Republican base. In order to put them all in a Wordist framework commentators call them “cultural conservatives.”

This is a combination that goes back before Andrew Jackson. In commentator terms there could not be a less possible combination than the Bible Belt Southerners and the Catholic ethnics who almost WERE the Democratic Party for over a century.

They certainly were not “cultural conservatives” in the 1850s. Midwest Republicans were as glued to their Bibles as any O’Hara in Chicago was to his bishop.

This coalition was WEIRD, but when I talked to a Chicago steelworker I didn’t need a translator the way I did in academia. That’s why they had no trouble with me speaking for them.

Let me end this excursion by going back to Ann Coulter’s experience. On campuses, the Beast is loose. But its power is limited by a lot of old Americans, Southern and ethnic and survivals like backbaygrouch.

What Ann Coulter saw, but could never understand, is that when she went to Canada, it was not just the Constitution that made the difference. What she saw was what happens when there are no Old Americans around.