How the left created Trump

By writing off right-wing Americans as deleterious to the ethical integrity of the country, left-wing Americans increasingly demonstrated that they hardly saw a place for the Republican Party in 21st century America at all. The ragtag nature of Trump’s campaign—delivering him to the forefront of the Republican Party while simultaneously dismantling it—only validated liberals’ righteousness. Recall that right up to election, the popular meme in the media was the conservative movement was in a state of collapse, and the liberals were dominant.

“The left has done very well in the cultural wars in the last couple of decades,” says Dalton Conley, an American sociologist and professor at Princeton University, “but there’s often a backlash.”…

Herein lies the problem with the left’s “by any means necessary” style of social activism: When any challenge to the prevailing liberal doctrine, cast under the wrong light, can forever cast one as a “racist,” those with dissenting opinions are left with only two options: concede, or retaliate.

Trump appealed to the latter by forming the populist right-wing counterpart to the left’s stubborn ethos.

Through this lens, Clinton’s candidacy can be seen as the political counterpart of liberal university students asserting that discussion is now off the table, where anything less than concession is morally suspect.