before Donald Trump declared he was running—to the amusement of the liberal media and Washington establishment, who didn’t stop laughing until Nov. 8—and long before Hillary Clinton dismissed half of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables,” the right had gotten used to being looked down upon by liberals. The general attitude of the left was: Disagree with us? You’re probably racist, xenophobic, sexist, bigoted or all of the above. Indeed, for many liberal Americans, these prejudices have come to be seen as inseparable from identity of the Republican Party itself. And when the GOP went allout Trump, it only confirmed to many liberals that their ideological opponents were no longer worthy of respect.

The attitude extended way beyond election politics. Over the last few years at universities across America, for example, liberal students effectively banned Republicans from delivering commencement speeches by protesting speakers like Karl Rove, Rand Paul and Condoleezza Rice, forcing them to withdraw.

On Nov. 8, it appears, the right decided it finally had enough of this smugness. Conservative voters—including many former workingclass Democrats who made the difference in key states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—sent the message that they’d had enough not only of losing economically, but also of being sneered at. Trump’s rise in popularity—and ultimately his election to the presidency—should be seen as a longbuilding reaction to grassroots liberal activism that came to dominate the cultural landscape and claim victory after victory in the social arena, whether the issue was abortion or gay marriage or transgender rights, always accompanied by that same disdain for rightwing views as worthy of the stone age. Trump’s rise to power evolved out of this frustration, as Clinton’s campaign increasingly became an extension of liberal America’s smugstyle of debate—an attitude that no longer disputed on grounds of policy or intellectual differences, but on the issue of the integrity of the right altogether.

By writing off rightwing Americans as deleterious to the ethical integrity of the country, leftwing 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.”

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Now the reckoning comes. While there is a clear need to rectify the indisputable disadvantages faced by America’s marginalized peoples—from the LGBTQ community, to Muslims, and people of color—Trump’s victory seems to indicate that unmitigated social activism can have unintended consequences.
Conley compares this to “the backlash after the Civil Rights movement in the form of Nixon.”

Nowhere was this tension more apparent than America’s college and university campuses where students’ pursuit of social justice left many people feeling that their free speech was under attack. Expectations for teachers to reshape their lessons around the phenomena of “microaggressions” and “triggers” led many faculty members across the country to question their ability to educate students at all, without fear of offending them. Last year, Yale’s Erika Christakis was forced to resign following student backlash to a seemingly innocuous email that attempted to engage students with respectful discourse about cultural appropriation—following which, one student wrote in the Yale Herald "I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.”