by Ipsa Liberales

How's that for some clickbait title, eh?

The reason I am glad that Trump won is very simple:  the next generation of them is coming.

In my Facebook feed right now is one of my cousins, who is 31, cis-female who is also gay, non-gender-conforming, having posted something in opposition to the trans bathroom laws. And in reply is her half-brother, who is 17, cis-male, straight, suburban, middle-class. He says genitalia defines gender, so if you have male genitalia, you go in the men's room, and female genitalia go in the ladies' room. End of story.

Except that, as a tall, athletic woman, of the butch persuasion, the half-sister has often been misgendered. She is exactly the type to get pushed out of either toilet for not conforming to her sex-based gender or for looking like the other sex.

He says she should just not let it bother her.
He has no idea.
And it's his sister.

Now, their father is a baby-boomer. The (step-) mother is just on the younger limit of that dataset, I think. They are republican. Together they have two kids and those kids are the embodiment of privilege in this country.

These young people would end what most liberals, I think, perceive as progress. This young man, not yet out of high school, thinks that a business should have the right to deny service based on LGBTQetc status. He says that the free market will sort it out. He says protecting a minority class is discrimination against everyone else. He sees no parallel between "Whites Only" and "Straights Only."

When I went away to college, this family became my family, as much because they were geographically nearby as that they are my genetic relations. I have long known what most liberals are waking up to: We are the minority; we are not doing as well as we think we are.

President Trump is a blazing neon sign that Americans in most of the states (I think Massachusetts was the only state to go pure blue by county), want to go back to a time cloaked in nostalgia, and to go backwards when it comes to social issues. This is a hard truth for the left, but it's the truth.

Some of us seem to have no idea.

Or... we didn't. We are all awake now. We are out of our cocoons. We have to step up, and we are. We have to do better. We can't get lazy. We can't get proud. We have to get to work.