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The nightmare interpretation of Tuesday’s U.S. election result is that half of America decided to inaugurate a regressive, sexist white nationalist empire. The more generous and more likely interpretation is that this was a protest vote — a protest vote of such force and intensity that American voters were even willing to register it with a candidate with such obvious character flaws.

But against what were they rebelling? Plenty of American liberals are wondering this weekend whether they themselves played a role in making the Trump presidency possible. Below, the National Post’s Tristin Hopper sums up the main arguments.

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Calling everything racist all the time

Plenty of big names spoke at the Democratic convention in July, and virtually every one of them has recently been the subject of a protest, a hashtag or an editorial calling them racist. Meryl Streep got it in February for serving on the all-white jury of the Berlin International Film Festival. Bill Clinton has been shouted down by Black Lives Matter protesters for his 1994 crime bill. Even Lena Dunham, who threatened to move to Canada if Trump won, faced a Twitter backlash in September for Tweeting, “An uncool thought to have: ‘is that guy walking in the dark behind me a rapist? Never mind, he’s Asian.’” A clear majority of Americans still believe that prejudice against ethnic minorities is a problem that needs to be fixed, but the nitpicking over every perceived case of bias may have started to annoy people. Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, no fan of Trump, wrote on Election Night that “it can be argued that the Left expended so much energy over the last several years being outraged over verbal missteps, accidental innuendo, ‘tasteless’ tweets … that when the REAL threat to equality emerged, we’d cried wolf too many times.”