Yeah, nobody is simply calling people they disagree with sexist/racist/whateverist. I get that racists are upset when they are called on their racist acts and words, but the solution isn't to just roll over and let them be racist.
I don't get it, but a lot of people seriously dislike Clinton (my bet is that they bought into the decades long Republican smear campaign, but not for rational reasons), and Clinton was running for a 3rd Democratic presidency in a row (traditionally very difficult), yet she still won the popular vote by almost 3 million. This is not the time for abandoning the quest for equality.
Okay, so admittedly this is an anecdote. That said.
I've considered myself liberal since pretty much my 20s, and the overwhelming majority of my meatspace friends are liberal. Back when Jenner did the change from Bruce to Caitlyn I was talking about the issue with a few friends and friends of friends. My contribution went something like this :
Feel like you're different than your traditional gender role? Cool!
Want to dress and act like a woman despite being born a man? Good on ya.
Want me to call you Cathy and not Carl? Will do my best to remember, honestly.
Want to be considered exactly the same as a woman born biologically female? Well, that's the one bit I stumble on.
At that point, one of the FoFs said I was in no position to judge and that I was no better than a hick who wanted to drag "a faggot behind his pickup truck for fun".
My experience was by no means universal, but by the same token it was not unique. I've seen far too much of it, mainly on line, but in meatspace as well. There's this razor-thin edge of acceptance these days which is pushing away far too many decent, reasonable people who are mostly on our side of things. No matter my feelings on marriage equality, no matter the small, personal contributions I made to the lives of a couple work-mates who were dying of AIDS - if I said that there was some possible way in which Jenner wasn't exactly as "woman" as someone born with a vagina I was an intolerant bigot.
This is the twisted irony of our times : gender is claimed to be a wide analog spectrum, but at the same time we still judge people on a simplistic binary scale : Good or Bad.
I remember having passionate, desperate conversations with people well before the elections even started about growing intolerance from 'our side'. We were supposed to be the good guys. We were supposed to be the compassionate ones, the ones welcoming of difference and diversity. But at some point we turned into our own brand of orthodoxy. I remember many years ago discussing in school how the ACLU defended the march through Skokie, and how that was a feather in our collective cap for embracing free speech even when the specific speech was (rightly) deplorable to us. Now? We desperately no-platform Christina Hoff-Somers for saying things we might not fully agree with.
That last bit alone makes me weep for liberalism in its current state. Beleive it or not there is a non-trival part of 'our side' calling anyone who doesn't toe an exacting party line some form of <x>-ist. You can say this comes mainly from academia/students/the media, and you'd be right, but that doesn't mean it's not there, or that it's not having a real-world affect on people (c.f. the *********** electoral map which SHOULD have been blue-er than the water in a tampon commercial).
Racists voted for Trump. So did sexists. So did homophobes. But not
everyone who voted for Trump did so because they fell into one of those easy to flag/easy to feel superior to categories. I personally know 4 people who voted Trump, and while I can find loads of flaws in the decision making processes that lead to their vote, those flaws DON'T rely on a simplistic 'you're a <x>-ist' pronouncement (other than one woman who is simply a stupid bint, if we're to pull no punches).
If we're ever to have a hope of putting liberal ideals into seats of governance again we have to drop the 'with us or against us' knife edge we've become over the last decade, and try and understand that the reasons why people might disagree with us, even if they're objectively flawed, can't be simply reduced to a trending hashtag or clever bumper sticker.
