At a time when political conservatism was alleged to be triumphant, politics came under the dominance of progressive movements that had been marginal the day before yesterday: questioning the Western literary canon, arguing that gays ought to be able to marry and adopt, suggesting that people could be citizens of more than one country, and so on. These disparate preoccupations did not spring up simultaneously by coincidence. They were old minoritarian impulses that could now, through the authority of civil rights law, override every barrier that democracy might seek to erect against them.
