That's exactly my point. Rightwing politicians (and their donors and lobbyists and campaign contributors, their scholarly think tanks and tame press, and the people THEY work for) aren't employed by racist rednecks; they work for corporations, companies, and very rich people. Follow the money, Robert. You're mistaking the symptom for the disease.

Whatever is financing fascism in America is not doing it because they hate blacks. They don't do it because they care about prayer in the schools, or abortions, or teaching evolution, or LGBT rights. They don't even care about Mexicans or Muslims or Homeland Security. And they certainly don't care about debunking global warming because climatologists and statists are using it to finance their careers. They are all on somebody's payroll.

That's the toolbox, that's how they're enlisting the Roseannes and Archie Bunkers and the NASCAR and C&W fans. My problem isn't with the Mutz study. I'm sure its good science, but its looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I object to how the results are being interpreted. And how is the Mutz study being interpreted? By Liberals?

"Far too many are just flat out racist, anti-semitic, and misogynist...
About a quarter of our fellow Americans are simply irredeemable assholes."

That's exactly what they want you to believe. Divide and conquer.

No wonder the Deplorables hate the "Liberal Elites". They sense this. They weren't born that way, there are no abstract historical conditions or cultural processes that have made them that way, they have been painfully and slowly manufactured, at great expense, for decades. Sure, the propagandists and demagogues have been working on pre-existing cultural biases and realities, but they've had to work very hard on them to harness them for their own purposes.

I also dispute the anecdotal evidence on the conservatives in your circle. Even people who are not immediately threatened financially have been subject to wage stagnation since the Reagan administration. The productivity gains they have achieved are not being shared with them, they are being passed UP the line. That's what the wage disparity is all about. And they can see their children do not have the same opportunities they enjoyed, and will not have the same benefits they have counted on. Even the relatively prosperous today know they are just treading water, and they could much more easily slide down the ladder than they could rise up.

The middle class has always been paid off to collaborate with the management/executive elite, and now they are finding those doors being slammed shut to them, and especially to their kids. The middle class has always felt the world owed them a living, and now its pretty clear the world has other plans. And since many in the middle class have working class roots, they know exactly how little separates them from that existence. Yeah, they're scared all right. They are shitting bricks.