At the end of the summer and what is conventionally considered the beginning of the election campaign, it seemed to me that there was one great mystery about the state of the country. Of course, it doesn’t exist, or exist as mystery, for the “woke” Left or the infallible moralists of the so-called “cancel culture.” There can be no mystery for them while their ideology assures them that there cannot be anything they don’t already know—up to and including what’s going to happen next week, next month, or next year in the “history” they claim to be on the right side of. The “progressive” ideology has all the answers. No, the great mystery is why so many people in the rest of the country—in particular liberal-minded non-ideologues and otherwise non- or barely political types who have spent the last four years complaining about the putative illiberalism of Donald Trump—are now so utterly supine in the face of left-wing illiberalism that dwarfs anything with which Mr. Trump could plausibly be charged.

No need, I suppose, to rehearse the details of this illiberalism. In recent months in this space I have written of cancel culture, and of the illiberal (not to mention economically ruinous) measures that have been taken and are still being taken in a mostly useless attempt to stop the spread of the coronavirus—the pandemic emergency, like war, proving itself to be the health of the state. Last month I wrote of the submission of numerous local authorities