It might be that the West’s greatest weakness is not military or economic, but moral and institutional. We continue to argue over the number of immigrants, quotas for refugees, and types of border technologies as if it were a technical question. But the more paramount issue may be whether the West still retains the moral authority necessary to justify enforcement. Civilizations do not sustain themselves simply because they have laws, but because they believe in the legitimacy of law enforcement. A society may continue to fund its courts, police, and criminal statutes long after it has lost confidence in their enforcement.

The crisis, in other words, is not primarily demographic. It is psychological and civilizational. Over the last fifty years, legal and justice-oriented codes of morality have gradually been replaced with therapeutic morality in the West. The former emphasizes rules, objectivity, hierarchy, and administering costs. The latter emphasizes emotional safety, inclusion, and minimizing harm. Helen Andrews has convincingly documented how the feminization of........

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