But there’s a deeper irony. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, fueled by a cynical media strategy directed by the president himself, the national conversation turned quickly from Barack Obama’s foreign-policy failures to the bigotry and insensitivity of the Republican party. There’s no denying that Donald Trump made this an easy pivot for the Beltway Brahmins. But left unnoticed in the clamor is the dismaying disconnect between the conversation elite liberals want to have and the one being pushed by their left-wing shock troops on the ground.

For instance, on ABC’s This Week, Representative Keith Ellison (D., Minn.) ripped into Republican rhetoric about Syrian refugees, saying that we must have “confidence in who we are as a nation . . . we need to be adhering to the values that have made this country strong.”

Ellison was hardly alone. Everyone seems to be talking about those American “values” of tolerance, diversity, and pluralism. Obama has been on a tear about how rejecting refugees is “not American” and how those refugees are akin to the pilgrims who arrived on our shores. He pays rote lip service to denouncing murderers in Paris.