It simply isn’t true that everyone situated to your right is indistinguishable from the most extreme right-wing position. The same holds for those situated to your left.

This goes beyond ideology. I can assure you that it’s possible at one and the same time to be a severe critic of Hillary Clinton and to think she’s clearly a better choice for the presidency than Donald Trump. I know it’s possible because that’s my position. Why do so many liberals assume that my Clinton criticisms imply that I favor Trump? And so many conservatives that my qualified Clinton support makes me a Hillary shill?

Hardest of all might be the effort to maintain a modicum of fair-mindedness about Trump and his supporters — to concede that Trump is unsuited to the presidency in all kinds of ways and that a loud faction of his admirers is clearly motivated by racial and other forms of animus while simultaneously acknowledging that the Trump phenomenon as a whole can’t be reduced to the moral status of a KKK rally.