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Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future, by Richard Bernstein (Knopf, 367 pp., $25)

FORTY-FOUR years after the death of George Orwell we find ourselves immured in an Orwellian culture, where language has become an instrument of political coercion and institutions created for intellectual enlightenment have been turned into bureaucracies of untruth. Having vanquished what Robert Conquest accurately described as “the biggest concentration of brute power the world has ever seen: a tremendous armament, a huge bureaucracy, an enormous police machine, a vast propaganda apparatus”—in other words, Soviet Communism—we are surrendering at home to mendacities even more insidious, because imposed from within, in their power to corrupt democracy.

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Hilton Kramer

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Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future, by Richard Bernstein (Knopf, 367 pp., $25)

FORTY-FOUR years after the death of George Orwell we find ourselves immured in an Orwellian culture, where language has become an instrument of political coercion and institutions created for intellectual enlightenment have been turned into bureaucracies of untruth. Having vanquished what Robert Conquest accurately described as “the biggest concentration of brute power the world has ever seen: a tremendous armament, a huge bureaucracy, an enormous police machine, a vast propaganda apparatus”—in other words, Soviet Communism—we are surrendering at home to mendacities even more insidious, because imposed from within, in their power to corrupt democracy.