Populism and Comity

A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:

No comity without commonality.

There cannot be comity without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language.  This is why  unrestricted and unregulated immigration of any and all, no matter what their beliefs and values, can be expected to lead to an increases in social and political disorder. But what is comity?

The Laudator Temporis Acti quotes (HT: Bill Keezer) Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970), The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), page number unknown:

Finally, there is a subtler, more intangible, but vital kind of moral consensus that I would call comity. Comity exists in a society to the degree that those enlisted in its contending interests have a basic minimal regard for each other: one party or interest seeks the defeat of an opposing interest on matters of policy, but at the same time seeks to avoid crushing the opposition, denying the legitimacy of its existence or its values, or inflicting upon it extreme and gratuitous humiliations beyond the substance of the gains that are being sought. The basic humanity of the opposition is not forgotten; civility is not abandoned; the sense that a community life must be carried on after the acerbic issues of the moment have been fought over and won is seldom very far out of mind; an awareness that the opposition will someday be the government is always present.

The present political climate is not one of comity but one of  contention and cold war, one that threatens to become 'hot.'  Although war is irrational and often pointlessly destructive, there is a logic to it. How can one tolerate and show  "a basic minimal regard" for people who represent an existential threat, where such a threat is not primarily to one's life, but to one's way of life and the liberties without which life is not worth living, religious liberty for example, not to  mention the liberty to speak one's mind without fear and the rest of the rights and freedoms enshrined in the first ten amendments to the U. S. Constitution?