We’ve seen this kind of thing before: When Amnesty International stuck to its mission — prisoners of conscience — William F. Buckley Jr. was on the board, and it had cross-ideological support for its core program. When it became just another left-wing advocacy organization, it lost its vitality. Roughly the same thing happened to the NAACP. On the right, the NRA lost its way when it took its eye off the Second Amendment ball and became in effect a subsidiary of the Republican Party and an unfocused right-wing culture-war committee.

We could use an organization that does what the ACLU used to do. But I fear that Americans, particularly American liberals, have long ago stopped believing their own dogma.