Were social justice warriors responsible for the election outcome?

[Regina]

So you mean regressive leftists because  that's what they literally are.

The term "SJW" (and to a lesser extent, regressive left) has been poisoned far beyond the point of salvagability. There needs to be a term for those sort of Jackasses that, hopefully, the right-wingers won't poison. 

I agree with everything you say in your post, but unfortunately I think this is a given. The alt-right is an opportunistic movement that appeals to traditionally centre or left-leaning people by exploiting the weaknesses of the Left. Notice how the alt-right are all about "rights" and "freedoms" and "freedom of speech" these days? In other words, they suddenly love all the principles that were fought for by The Left against the Right over the past few centuries. They can do that to appeal to traditional Leftists because they know The contemporary Left has dropped those crusades and it's not sitting well with a lot of people.

And yes, that extends to terms used to criticise the Left too. Any time we as leftists introduce a term to self-criticise, they'll appropriate it, take it out of context and over-use it to exploit.

I think the only way to soften the effect of that is to maintain a simultaneous criticism of the alt-right while we have these discussions about "regressive leftism" among ourselves, reclaim the terms. Call out the alt-right for what they are, opportunists, get more people to see that and their tactics should stop working. We need a strong centre-political voice, which is opposed to both "regressive Leftism" but also doesn't leave the alt-Right un-challenged.