Pendulum swinging away from the right?

IT has been a difficult few years for anyone who holds cautiously progressive beliefs, for anyone who believes that considered liberalism and broad, but qualified, tolerance are empowering for mankind. It is as if the optimistic energy generated by the possibility that we might be better — or reach higher ground, as the old hymn-makers described it — was drained away by a resurgence of older, darker values. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency was an incomprehensible and sad rejection of the values that, in the very loosest terms, celebrate that old, honourable aspiration — liberté, égalité, fraternité.