None of these defenses looked persuasive once the new order took hold. False rape accusations are rare in many contexts, yes, but bad systems generate bad cases, and a system designed to assume the guilt of the accused has clearly encouraged dubious charges and clouds of suspicion and pre-emptive penalties unjustly applied.

Meanwhile any balance of terror, as Yoffe points out in the third installment of her series, has turned out to be racial as well as sexual, since it is a not-much-talked-about truth that minority students seem to be accused of rape well out of proportion to their numbers on campus. So setting out to strengthen women’s power relative to men has created a cycle of accusation and punishment whose injustices probably fall disproportionately on black men.

As for whether the unjust system might nonetheless have some sort of remoralizing effect on male sexual behavior, I stand by what I argued a few years ago. Offering young men broad sexual license regulated only by a manifestly unfair disciplinary system imbued with the rhetoric of feminism seems more likely to encourage a toxic male persecution complex, a misogynistic masculine reaction, than any renewed moral conservatism or rediscovered chivalry.

Or to put it in the lingo of our time: That’s how you get Trump.

Having gotten him, liberals lately have been arguing that any madness or folly or ideological mania on their own side pales in comparison with the extremism at work in Trump-era conservatism. This argument has force: With Trump in the White House the know-nothing side of the right has much more direct political power at the moment than the commissars of liberalism.

But it is also important to recognize that the folly of the campus rape tribunals is not just an extremism isolated in the peculiar hothouse of the liberal academy. The abandonment of due process on campus was encouraged by activists and accepted by administrators, yes, but it was the actual work of the Obama White House — an expression of what a liberalism enthroned in our executive branch and vested with the powers of the federal bureaucracy believed would defend the sexual revolution and serve the common good.

It wasn’t a policy from the liberal fringe, in other words. It was liberalism, period, as it actually exists today and governed from the White House until very recently. And any reader of The Atlantic who experiences a certain shock at what has been effectively imposed on college campuses in the name of equality and social justice will also be experiencing a moment of solidarity with all of those Americans who prefer not to be governed by this liberalism, and voted accordingly last fall.