After a Chinese-born professor had to give up teaching his class at the University of Michigan in October for showing students a dated film in which Laurence Olivier appeared in blackface, nearly 700 faculty members signed a letter calling for his reinstatement. The dean of Yale Law School, a staging ground for some of the most notorious abuses of this era, publicly expressed regret after school administrators last year tried to make a student recite a humiliating apology script following a trumped-up outrage (he had sent a jocular party invitation referring to his apartment as a "trap house"). This spring, after protesters shouted down a Federalist Society event on campus, the dean called this "unacceptable" and said "at a minimum it violated the norms of this Law School." Meanwhile, a growing list of colleges is following the University of Chicago's 2015 establishment of the principle that a campus should be a place for free debate.

The recent Times editorial defending free speech against threats on both sides represents a turning point. The article's rather anodyne free-speech-is-good argument masked its larger significance: America's most important newspaper was implicitly promising not to let social-media outrage campaigns dictate its decisions. The Philadelphia Inquirer in February published a history of its own blinkered racial past by Wesley Lowery that revealed how angry readers forced its well-regarded executive editor to resign over a column by the paper's architecture critic* lamenting the burning of buildings during the George Floyd protests. While Lowery told the story in a neutral, just-the-facts way, it was impossible to interpret its publication as anything but a confession of error.

After Democrats lost seats in Congress in 2020, and nearly lost the presidency, they began to say out loud things they only whispered privately before. Former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter blamed "white wokeness" for denying the crime wave in his city. Congressman Ruben Gallego seethed over the left's use of the word Latinx: "When Latino politicos use the term, it is largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use." San Francisco mayor London Breed, whose city is also facing a spike in crime, lashed out at "the bullshit that has destroyed our city."

I can think of three reasons why the PC wave may be ebbing. The first is that many liberals who were uncertain how to respond to these norms have seen enough of them to decide they don't like them, having gone from positive or indifferent to critical. Writers like Matthew Yglesias and Jeffrey Sachs, who a few years ago were dismissing the notion of any rising trend of illiberalism on the left as a myth, have since conceded the trend is very real. Left-wing publications like Jacobin and commentators like Briahna Joy Gray have increasingly criticized the left's rigid approach to gender and identity.

Second, the cultural changes brought about by these ideas quickly exposed their inherent impracticality. One response to the Floyd murder was a massive surge in demand for workplace racial-sensitivity training, some of which was clumsy and some of which was simply ludicrous. Some anti-racism trainings defined white supremacy to include "written communication," "a sense of urgency," "scientific, linear thinking," "planning for the future," and other habits of any viable organization.

The third, and largest, factor curtailing political correctness was the 2020 elections. The defeat of Donald Trump removed an accelerant in the discourse. By rubbing the country's face in his unapologetic racism, and posing as a transparently disingenuous critic of "cancel culture" (who was, in reality, trying to cancel his critics all the time), Trump did more to encourage PC excess than a thousand Robin DiAngelos could have.

The Democrats' middling performances in 2020 and the 2021 off-year elections, and the lessons they might contain for the upcoming midterms, have brought elected Democrats face-to-face with the consequences of allowing the most militant members of the progressive movement to bully their party into adopting maximalist stances on issues like school closings, immigration enforcement, and crime. It's now much harder for progressives to depict, say, support for enforcing immigration law or opposition to defunding the police as inherently racist when it's clear the communities supposedly offended by those positions support them. There is an old saying that politics is downstream from culture, but in this case, culture is downstream from politics. When Democratic elected officials openly blamed their troubles on purity tests imposed by social activists, it gave permission for liberals elsewhere to resist tactics to which they had previously submitted.