In a way, I don’t live in America. My world is the minority one of NPR and kalamata olives. This week, however, I’m writing from a cruise ship, and America this is. This is the America of USA Today, sausage links and “Rumor Has It.”

These are also the people who Blue Americans are given to thinking of as “scary” hordes, ever on the brink of returning America to the heartless Social Darwinism of the Gilded Age.

The idea is that because of this, we enlightened folk are to craft our public statements so as to hold off this eternal threat. When I put an American flag sticker on my windshield after September 11, a friend of mine of this type actually ripped it off, an action she meant as something between a joke and a protest. In her eyes, there were so many people “out there” who might take the sticker as a call for ignorant jingoism that it was irresponsible for a college professor to have the sticker on his car. About every fourth letter in my mailbag is from someone who says that they agree with my often right-of-center comments on race, but “worry” that people “out there” might misinterpret me as suggesting a return to Jim Crow, or leaving ghettos to fester unattended.

This week the people so often referred to as “out there” are right “in here” with me on this boat. Do these people “worry” me? Frankly, no.

Take the couple I will call Fred and Barbara, who I had breakfast with one morning. Fred and Barbara are white Nebraskans in late middle age, very “About Schmidt” sorts of people.When immigration came up, they immediately said that the problem with Latinos in their community was that they “don’t learn English.”

This is the kind of thing that “worries” Blue Americans — here, apparently, is racism, xenophobia, and so on. But I’m not so sure. Barbara remembered how German immigrants of her grandfather’s generation only spoke English in public, proud of being new Americans. Now, to be sure, Barbara is not aware of the subtle differences in social dynamics between immigration then and now, such as that Latino immigrants can visit home frequently, stay in close touch via the phone, and often do not intend to stay in America forever. And there is likely some nostalgia at play. In “Main Street,” Sinclair Lewis depicted German farmer immigrants in the pre-World War I Midwest who never got beyond basic English — and Lewis was writing from his own experience.

But Fred and Barbara also spontaneously brought up how well Latinos brought up their children, and when I noted that the immigrants’ children did speak good English, they agreed. Fred and Barbara probably do not listen to NPR or read books like “Guns, Germs and Steel.” Nor, however, do they see the world strictly in blacks and whites.

Sure, there are Freds and Barbaras who do. But I am unaware that there are, proportionally, any more of these in “Real” America than among hardcore leftists firing away on blogsites and proselytizing in university classrooms. If small-business tax breaks alone determine how some Freds or Barbaras vote, a candidate’s being pro-choice may just as well determine how some Justins and Caitlins vote, and in that, the latter are no more or less reflective than the former.

I sense that some think that the leftist firebrand, even if somewhat “over the top,” is somehow more reflective than Fred and Barbara. The firebrand, after all, is privy to understanding subtle things such as “societal racism.”

There are any number of places one could go with that, but in the end, the idea would seem to be that we are to yearn for an electorate of intellectuals. This, however, is not only futile but unnecessary.

It is futile in that most humans have never been, are not, and never will be intellectuals — and really, it would be rather scary if they were. As this ship leaves British Columbia, I recall a Canadian I once knew who was offended that most Americans cannot name the Canadian provinces despite their being just north of our country. But among no rain forest tribe, in no village on the steppes, nor in any metropolis are most humans given to hoarding data points just for the sake of it. I wondered how much she knew about the different regions of the Nunavut Eskimo territory just north of where most Canadians reside.

More to the point, an intellectual electorate is unnecessary. Keystone societal advances like Civil War widow’s pensions, child labor laws, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Act have occurred without there being an Isaiah Berlin on every barstool.

The main thing is that one can be reflective without being intellectual. We are often taught that to be on the left is, itself, to be reflective. But illogical truisms like “unequal outcomes always mean unequal opportunity” suggest otherwise. Reflectiveness is evenly distributed in the population, and nothing Fred or Barbara said during our breakfast struck me as any “scarier” than much of what one catches on Air America.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.