THINGS were said in 2016 that many thought would never again be uttered in American or European mainstream politics – about immigrants, women, Mexicans, Muslims, refugees. We heard the man who would be elected US president dismiss his boastful comment about “grabbing women by the p***y” as “locker-room banter”. In the UK, we saw a poster depicting a queue of non-white immigrants and refugees, with the slogan “Breaking Point”, used in the successful Brexit campaign.

The problem, therefore, is not so much what happened in 2016, as what bodes for 2017 in a world in which Donald Trump is president, the white supremacist “alt-right” is a key US movement, and the far right is on the rise in Europe. What happens to equality and human rights when the dominant vote-winning narratives revolve around xenophobic rhetoric?

Recent research showed that the chief influence on whether a person voted Remain or Leave in the European referendum was not their view on economics, or the politics of right or left, but their “identity and values”. According to the bodies who conducted that research, “the so-called culture wars of the US” had “arrived in Great Britain in earnest”.

Key culture wars issues in the United States, are abortion, immigration, race, transgender rights and same-sex marriage. We have seen the rise of a kind of politics in which the key divisions exist between the authoritarian and the permissive, between those who look to bolster longstanding fundamental traditions, often patriarchal, and those who challenge them. In Britain, the think tank, Nesta, revealed that one of the strongest predictors for a Leave vote was support for capital punishment. In the United States, one of the most accurate predictors of whether someone would be a Trump supporter was not class or education, but their views on parenting. Those who took an authoritarian view, valuing “being well-behaved over being considerate”, were more likely to vote Trump. Such supporters were also more likely to reject the protection of minority rights.

Such culture wars have long coloured our politics. But last year, they moved into centre-stage. Right-wing tabloids conveyed a diet of stories about “political correctness gone mad” and scapegoating tales of immigrants. The Westminster women and equalities committee appointed Philip Driver MP, who believes political correctness “has neutered men”. We have, said the Guardian's Moira Weigel, reached an era of “anti-political-correctness gone mad”.

Trump, of course, has been one of the most aggressive attackers of political correctness. A key moment in his campaign came in August when Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly, confronted him for calling women he didn’t like “fat pigs”, “dogs”, “slobs” and “disgusting animals”.

“I think the big problem this country has,” replied Trump, “is being politically correct.”

Trump and his key team members exemplify a US culture that is shockingly disrespectful towards women, non-whites, and minority groups. Trump's nominated Attorney General is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, a man who, in 1986, was considered by a Republican Senate to be too racist to serve on the US District Court. Sessions has blamed disabled children for a decline in civility at schools. Vice President-elect Mike Pence has a long history of being evangelically anti-LGBT, having signed a “religious freedom” bill in Indiana, supported “conversion therapy” as a member of Congress, and made a speech about how “marriage equality” would lead to “societal collapse”.

Alongside this, a hitherto obscure, mostly-online, nationalist subculture known as the alt-right managed to gain such a hold in American politics that its figures have become households names.

One of the most fraught issues in these cultural wars is abortion. Already reproductive rights are under attack. Since the 2010 mid-term elections which brought conservative majorities to many US state houses, there has been a vast expansion of state anti-abortion regulations. Most of them were designed to make the procedure harder to access or deliver, or more uncomfortable.

Some 19 states passed 60 new abortion restrictions in 2016, including the Ohio State “heartbeat bill”, which would ban abortions as soon as a foetal heartbeat could be detected – potentially as early as six weeks – with no exceptions for rape and incest. In fact, many of these were countered at court level. Last year Whole Women’s Health, a group of abortion clinics, objected through the Supreme Court to Texas’s new requirements for abortion providers to meet the same standards as outpatient surgeries, which would have led to the closure of many centres, and saw the bill struck down.

Some analysts believe that abortion could have been a key issue in Trump’s winning of the election, since it is a “bottom-line” issue for many US evangelicals, and Clinton had vowed to fight restrictions on abortion. Trump, who once described himself as “very pro-choice”, shifted to a pro-life position, and said at one point that women should face legal punishment for having abortions. Meanwhile, Vice President-elect Mike Pence is a man who signed eight anti-abortion bills into law in four years as governor of Indiana and declared that a Trump/Pence administration would see the legal guarantee of abortion rights in the US “consigned to the ash heap of history”.

One of the biggest fears with regard to reproductive rights, is that Trump will appoint a US Supreme Court Justice that will vote to repeal Roe v Wade, the legislation that disallows states from prohibiting abortions before the foetus is viable, usually around 22 to 24 weeks. This seems likely, given he has already declared that his Supreme Court appointments will be “pro-life”.

And it’s not just women in the United States who could feel the impact. As the New York attorney and journalist Jill Filipovic has predicted, Trump's administration will use "US dollars to hold other countries hostage to American abortion politics”. One of the major threats, she believes, is the potential reinstatement of the Reagan administration's "Global Gag Rule", a ban on any group receiving US aid from providing abortions, counselling patients about the procedure, or campaigning for changes within the countries they worked in. Such constraints would have the knock-on effect of more women turning to unsafe abortions – already a leading causes of maternal mortality, causing the deaths of 68,000 women annually.

Europe, meanwhile, is not untouched by these culture wars over abortion. In Poland, a petition before the parliament to make abortion a criminal offence resulted in a mass street protest of more than 100,000 women, dressed in black. This “Czarny” (black) protest succeeded and the proposal was voted down. In September thousands marched on Dublin, demanding that the Irish government repeal the Eighth Amendment, which states that women can only legally procure an abortion where there is substantial risk to the woman’s life.

Here in Scotland, debate has been brewing since the powers to determine abortion law were devolved to Holyrood. Even before these powers passed over, American-style abortion politics were already surfacing in the form of The 40 Days For Life campaign, which picketed outside a Glasgow hospital in Glasgow. More recently women’s rights organisations launched a campaign to push for decriminalisation of abortion and the scrapping of the requirement for two doctors to approve an abortion.

Abortion rights are just one area threatened by the rise of populist politics. Many fear that Trump will choose a Supreme Court that will undermine same-sex marriage. There is also the question of what a US president who once vowed to ban Muslims from entering the US and build a "wall", will mean for the rights of Muslims, immigrants and other minorities.

And what of the bigger, global picture? Progress on equality and human rights often moves in fits and starts. In 2016 there were victories as well as threats and back-slidings. India passed a disabilities bill that stipulates up to two years in jail for discriminating against differently-abled people. Same-sex sexual activity was decriminalised in Belize, the Seychelles and Nauru.

But the stream of stories of intolerance and bigotry was relentless, even in Europe. In France, seaside resorts put in place a burkini ban, which was blocked by the courts. Shocking measures were frequently mooted here in the UK, such as one a Tory backbencher's suggestion that unaccompanied minors from the bulldozed Calais migrant camp should be subjected to dental tests to determine their ages. A UN inquiry found UK welfare reforms had led to “grave and systematic violations” of disabled people’s rights. Meanwhile LGBT leaders are observing a global backlash and the stalling of progress.

Such a climate requires everyone who believes in the rights of those who are not in the majority to get into their trenches and defend them. In the United States, a mass demonstration, the Women’s March On Washington, is planned for the day after Trump’s inauguration. Here in the UK a sister protest is planned in London. If there’s one thing we can be sure of in the year to come, it's that, for both sides, the culture wars are far from over.

Bu