Google professes a commitment to diversity, inclusion and openness, so there is no small irony that it now finds itself in the hot center of America’s diversity culture wars. The tech giant’s dismissal of a contrarian software engineer this week also raises deeper questions about the atmosphere of ideological conformity in corporate America.

Google computer scientist James Damore triggered the uproar when he published a memo last week blasting the search company’s “politically correct monoculture” and progressive gender policies. After his cri de coeur went viral, Google CEO Sundar Pichai fired Mr. Damore for violating the company’s code of conduct by “advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

Mr. Damore, who says several times that discrimination exists and is a problem, could have used an editor to soften his stridency and to fact-check some of his many pop-psychology claims about emotional differences between men and women. But even Mr. Pichai wrote that “much of what was in that memo is fair to debate,” and posts on Google’s internal messaging board support Mr. Damore for some of the issues he raised.

His main argument is that Google’s policies have created a conformist culture. Silencing alternative viewpoints, he says, “has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.” He writes that “discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive and bad for business.” That, essentially, is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s criticism of racial preferences.

Mr. Damore proposes steps Google could take to increase intellectual diversity, such as “stop alienating conservatives,” “confront Google’s biases,” “de-moralize diversity,” and “reconsider making Unconscious Bias training mandatory.”