The answer is one of mankind’s oldest stories. Confessing other people’s sins (real or imagined) and inflicting punishment on them has ever been human beings’ preferred path to feeling good about themselves. The more fault I find and the more penance I impose on thee, the holier I am than thou. The worse you are, the better I am and the more power I should have over you.

Because feeling better about one’s self by denigrating and punishing others is an addictive pleasure the appetite for which grows with each satisfaction, victories can never satiate those who wage identity politics as war. The insatiability of their need to bolster self-esteem at others’ expense is the reason why our rulers must trump every imposition with another, without end.

It is why satisfying any of political correctnesses’ demands only generates more. Finding or manufacturing new ones is cheap and fun. But precisely that unwillingness, that incapacity, to aim at an end point in which our rulers might be satisfied ensures that they engender more revolt than submission. The sort of people against whom Americans revolted 250 years ago were not as pretentious.