The Demonization of Political Correctness

If American culture is centrifugal, and things are falling apart, what is the center that is not holding? Presumably, it is some core of principles—individual rights and opportunities— united by the affirmation that America, heartland of the West, is their home.

There is, in the end, no more coherence in the defense of the center than in the assertion of essential difference, but there is a common rhetoric. The center under bombardment by barbarians is “Western liberal values...