That unfortunate storm sent out all the wrong vibes, giving the impression that it wasn’t a welcoming event open to everyone who loves science-fiction, but something incestious and cliquey where the wrong type of fan wasn’t welcome.

I think you may be painting a bleaker picture that is accurate. I’m not convinced that the vast majority of Worldcon attendees and Dragoncon voters are intolerant bigots, but it’s the most unpleasant people who make the most noise on the internet. The Alt-Right anf the Regressive Left are loud but small minorities that have been allowed to define their communities.

The puppies accuse the hugos of representing nothing but a secret clique of loony-lefty types too many of whom have it in for white men, while social-justice SF accuses the puppies/dragons of representing nothing but a secret clique of american guns-and-god right-wingers too many of whom have it in for minorities and people who refuse to fit into the gender binary.

They are both right.

SF&F no longer has/is a model of a better shared future in the way Gene Roddenberry did. When one side is led by someone who says Andres Brevik will one day be considered a hero, and the other side is full of people who claim that “there’s not such thing as racism towards white people” (or any group) then both sides are so far down the rabbit-hole of fascism that they can never hope to find their way back. Thus the genre, at least in its written form, has surrendered any claim to relevance or importance, having split into ‘opiate for the masses’ and ‘opiate for sociology professors’ variants.

So all we are left with is these two groups of warring, tribalist bigots. They will never be able to co-exist, and in this regard the Dragon awards are a good thing. Hopefully now the community will divide into seperate identities and the fighting will stop. Neither group would be one that I would want to be part of, because the one group, for all they deny it, will always have a problem with me because of the color of my skin, whereas the other group would have no problem with me, but a problem with some of my friends because of the color of theirs. (You can subsitute gender identity for skincolor and get the same result too. And let’s not talk about class). Thus we need a third group, but I do not think SF has the critical mass of people committed to a common human identity to support that: they have either left, or drunk one flavor of kool-aid or the other.

Thus, this ‘two extremist communities’ result is the best we can get. Hopefully it will not prove to be a model for larger society, though all the evidence is that we are heading that way.