A lot of people are racist, hateful, bigoted, and these figureheads give them permission to be their worst selves. That's really the long and the short of it.
Everyone is always afraid to say why people like Trump or Marie Le Pen have some level of popularity and it’s just that there’s a lot of people in the world who believe in racism. You end up with these goofy ass explanations for Trump where it’s NAFTA or shit and it’s like no you know what it is
Maybe I'm naive, plenty of white folk who aren't racist "in their hearts" don't know how racist the policies they support are.
The Southern Strategy didn't fool Northerners into thinking Southerners aren't racist - it fooled the Southerners's kids.
But I'm teachable about this if I'm wildly wrong.
Those aren't mutually exclusive things. Being bound up within the systems of white supremacy and other bigotries can very easily lead those who profit from those systems, even unawares, to violently defend those systems.
Imho most bigotries (obviously irrational) are mostly not rationally held beliefs but dispositions operating unconsciously. See: wildly racist people insisting they are not racist.
