a lot of moderate reactionaries are perpetually engaged in the project of claiming that conservative grievances are not driven by racism, but are in fact practical and legitimate.
[watching the political coalition that emerged in the 70s & 80s gut the voting rights act, undo roe v wade, end affirmative action, while rallying around a virulently open racist who claimed obama was from kenya] this is almost certainly the result of the spread of wal-mart in the south,
in 2016, when Trump voters were being called racist, these guys all mobilized to say Trump’s appeal was all about the economic alienation of the white working class. then the data came out and oops, no, it was actually racism
basically thru a bad-faith reach of equivocating the point "Democrats in the Clinton era have been really bad at serving working-class interests" to "a misogynist vote for the racist orange man"
leftists will be like “i am concerned that despite his long history of civil rights support his rhetoric indicates he thinks racism is primarily an economic issue, which is incomplete” while liberals just say “i don’t see why ranting about superpredators is racist. it’s not.”
The same people who called Bernie Bro's white supremacists turned around and declared the Clintons using prisoners as servants when Bill was governor of Arkansas was fine and not racist at all actually.
In my experience they don't actually believe anti-racism can be a genuinely held belief, it's just another tool to gain power and enforce boundaries.
It's why they're so happy to join in with the right's claims that "the left are the real racists".
Honestly they (the bigots) were tired of having to pretend for so long and then Trump showed up and gave them permission to let their hate flags fly - it must feel so good to them.
We thought we succeeded when we started teaching kids that racists were bad people. That was actually failure. Because those kids and their parents would always say: "well, *I* am not a bad person, and racists are bad people, so therefore I am not a racist!¨
Putting the very best face (i.e. mask) on the Trump voter who denies racism, one would have to twist themselves into a pretzel shape that reads something like: "populism but not the racism" ;"tax cuts but not the racism" ; "I don't like the racism but I like the __" Doesn't work like that.
Even here, a lot of the old school “I legitimately thought we were in this for the tax cuts and a small government philosophy for its own sake” cohort has realized they were the marks all along
The idea that this society isn't actually a meritocracy really scares those who benefit from believing it is. They have to find a way to assume that those with power and status are acting reasonably and fairly.
Tbh it seems like the moderate reactionaries are more clear-eyes about this, because they’ve been part of it, and it mostly comes from both cossetted neoliberal pundits and leftists who think class overrides everything.
