Apologies for snipping so much, but I wanted to focus on this bit - don't take that as me writing off or ignoring the rest of what you had to say.
I agree with you - liberal intolerance is not at all the only reason we elected the Bloviating Gasbag. I think my PoV is that it played a larger part in things than you seem to think it did, but that's okay - your view vs. mine is merely a difference of degree, rather than kind, and there's nothing wrong with that. For my part I didn't for a moment want to imply that "SAFE SPACES!" were the single only reason Trump won. But I strongly feel intolerance of deviation from what we've come to see as the Right Way played a non-trivial part in bringing us to where we are.
One of the few meatspace rhetorical victories I've won was arguing with someone who thought marriage equality would open the floodgates for people looking to 'scam the system' in some unspecified way. Rather than shouting him down as a bigot I asked him to clarify what he meant, and challenged him on what I thought were the weaknesses in his position. He had a regressive repugnance about him, but rather than shriek and denounce him for it, I tried to show him the flaws in his line of thought. I don't think I totally convinced him, but I know I at least shook the foundations of his certainty. I got him to at least reconsider his bigoted PoV, and that was at least something.
Getting him to be less cock-sure about 'them faggots who just wanted to rip the rest of us off' was just one step in getting one person to consider a viewpoint different to the one he'd been married to. If I'd simply called him a homophobic knuckle-dragger, there wouldn't have even been that much of a victory. I most likely won't be able to convince a Stormfronter that that Jews really aren't out to get him. But maybe I can give a fellow liberal a gentle nudge and convince them that someone failing to use a preferred pronoun doesn't make that person as evil as Goebbels, and that treating that person as such will most likely deafen them to the message of tolerance and acceptance we'd like them to hear.
Liberal intolerance is not the only reason we're in the situation we're in, and it may or may not be the largest reason. But it's the one we, as liberals, have the most immediate influence on, and is where I feel we should start the work on restoring some sanity to social/political discourse in our society.
Well it's going to depend on how much the problem is the growing insular and intolerant nature of many groups on the left and how much is the grouping of them all together. They're really not all supportive of all these ideas just because they're all on the left. More on that below.
But you've hit on something that I meant to point out in a few of my recent posts. For too many on the left and in the center, finding a policy or person to be motivated by racism was seen as an
end of the conversation. We took it too much for granted that would lead to the same conclusion we came to from such a finding, and that they'd agree with such a finding when we did even if it got tossed out in cases where it wasn't a valid finding. That's simply not the case. We have to do better linking point A to point C. 'This policy is motivated by racism
and here is why that's a bad thing.'
It works the same with other invalid bigotry as well.
I also believe that focusing on the blatant sexism, racism and other bigotry was a tactically bad choice. That's only part of the conversation, although it should of course still be part of it. I don't believe for a second that America has rejected the idea that these things are still problems.
One of the problems with analyzing election results is that we look at something that played only a minor role in influencing the way people vote, and dismiss it as insignificant, forgetting that this election was lost by something like 0.5% of the vote. Change that many votes, and Florida and Michigan turn blue. I'm not sure about Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Maybe they would need a full 1%.
You also have to remember that most of the electorate had made up their minds before the first vote was cast in the primaries. Most people were going to vote for either the Republican or Democratic nominee regardless of who it was.
So you have to look at what swayed the remainder, and there, I think the things you mention, and the things Jonathan Pie mentioned, come into play in a pretty big way.
Also, when considering the margin of victory, I think racism played almost no role in this election at all. The real racists were among those who were going to vote Republican no matter what. Four years ago, Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama. There hasn't been a whole lot of turnover in the population during those four years. If we say that racism is the reason people voted for Trump, you have to explain why some of those people, enough to form the margin of victory, voted for Obama four years ago. Their racism prevented them from voting for Hillary Clinton, but not for Barack Obama? Or was it that Romney was insufficiently racist, so they figured they might as well vote for the black guy, but now that they had a real racist to vote for, they went for it?
I don't think it makes sense.
There were many small things that could have changed those over, and I don't want to give too much credence to any single one if possible. To me, the more important question are which policies and attitudes will lead to the best outcomes rather than which are the easiest to 'sell'. Just like with critical thinking and science outreach, it's about figuring out how best to sell the most advantageous ideas.
Let me point out a potential flaw in your reasoning though. Your analysis is about which
states went which way, not which
voters did. There is no guarantee that the people who voted this time were the same as who voted last time. Of course there is bound to be overlap, but it's possible last time the racists didn't vote for Obama, and those who voted for Obama didn't vote this time. With voter turnout the way it is, this doesn't seem implausible to me. I don't know if it's true or not though without evidence.
Also, see what I said above. White racism isn't the only racism.
Note that while I'm not discounting racism, I'm not saying it's the reason Trump won. A bigger problem is how this has emboldened racism because they either think it was, or at the least they think people will give them a pass on it because they did for Trump and his racist words and actions. They are now testing to see what they can normalize.
Can I just please state that left and liberal and not synonyms. Liberal and left policies are very different in many areas, but they do overlap in some areas as do liberal and right policies. That does not mean that liberal policies are inherently "centralist" they are simply not on the same axis as the traditional right and left.
This is worth noting. In the US, it's 'close enough for jazz', and that is one of the major problems. We get used to binary opposition states. Left or right, liberal or conservative, authoritarian or libertarian, bad person or good person.
This means that 'the right' will hold things not widely advocated by those on the 'the left' such as 'cultural appropriation' of basic clothing or foods against all on 'the left'. They're all just a bunch of college know it all elites. It works the other way. The right are all judged by the Klan. This makes many enemies out of would be allies. How many have eaten their own in the recent SJW conflicts? If one is going to be rejected inevitably from a community over the first disagreement (especially if one is not of a protected class), then what's the point in not embracing this opposition community?
The reality is not an easy to describe and oppose binary, but a complex weave of continuum.
