Recently, my daughter and her teenage son were trying to sort out the term "cisgender" as opposed to "transgender." It's a "woke" term to describe people like my daughter who seems quite happy to live with the anatomical equipment she was born with. (The prefix trans- comes from Latin, meaning across from or on the other side of. In contrast, the prefix cis- means on this side of.)

Millions of Americans have come to resent the notion that they are racist or homophobic if the "woke" guardians of political correctness say they are. Oops, I fear it's possible I may have inadvertently committed a "micro-aggression" just now. That means I might have offered someone an insult so minuscule as to have almost escaped detection.

A world obsessed with purity is a violent and unforgiving place. We recognize it quickly in others. We see the cruelty in Islamic fundamentalism, for example. If theology were drugs and you were looking for the really pure stuff, you might need to find a madrassa in Yemen. Liberals see it and fear it in right-wing nationalism and its obsession with ethnic purity, sexual purity, ideological purity. What liberals don't get is that some of the extremism on the right is a reaction to its counterpart on the Left.

Let's not tumble into a he-hit-me-first distraction. As the Right moved right, the Left moved left. Please be patient with me. Im not assigning blame; Im looking for clarity.

The progressive movement grew up in the Roaring 20s. It was a reaction to the grotesque concentrations of wealth supported by a vast toiling class who lived in 50 shades of misery. Many of its recruits, in this country at least, were motivated by Jewish and Christian principles of compassion and social justice.

By the Depression Era, New Deal liberalism saw the rising prosperity of unionized working men and women. The Civil Rights Era wasn't here yet but the liberalism of the time took the same position Abraham Lincoln took. Minority groups may not have been equals, but they certainly didn't deserve slavery or oppression.

By the 1960s, the civil rights movement was born - and it insisted on nothing less than equality. Finally, the suffering sustained by institutionalized inequality was being faced squarely. The founding impetus for the movement was compassion and empathy. With it came a growing astonishment and revulsion at the ugliness and cruelty latent in the human heart. Liberals, in facing how entrenched racism was in America, fell out of love with Joe Sixpack and much of the working class they'd previously championed. Too prejudiced or, as Hillary put it, "deplorables."

At that moment, a gust of oxygen flowed into the conservative movement. If the Left no longer could embrace ordinary working people, the Right would. The secret was to happily accept the white working class just the way they were and promise not to threaten them with multicultural initiatives.

In our long history, America has still not come to terms with its own diversity - and liberals have failed to grasp how difficult it is for so many people to accept human difference. The effects of racism are cruel, but for many people the roots of it are a profound discomfort. If shaming people for this discomfort had been an effective strategy, wed have solved our problem back in the 1960s. Instead, an unrelenting hardscrabble economy and even coronavirus worries convince many Americans the economy is a zero-sum game. Liberals, it is being argued, want to take from you and yours and hand it out to them and theirs.

This is the worst time for the political and cultural Left to double down on blaming and shaming people who cant keep up. The classic Democratic coalition was built from blue-collar workers. As the party began to defend racial, then sexual minorities, it started to lose its labor support. This sensitivity to the suffering of others and their exploitation is the moral bedrock of liberalism, but liberals are losing their compassion for those with whom they disagree. This is understandable but also catastrophic morally and politically. The remedy is spiritual: Compassion for all, listening without judgment, explaining without condescension.

The Left cannot successfully claim to represent the economic interests of people whom they cannot love.

Lawrence Brown of Centerville teaches humanities and is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.

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The price we pay for an obsession with purity - Cape Cod Times