[Sorry_Rum_Ham]

I believe the reason for the uptick is two-fold.

1.) In general, this is a reactionary movement from the elite class of society(straight, white, cis people) to keep a death grip on the social and systemic power they see being taken from them in the form of diversity, equality, feminism, etc. This has been happening for a long time now, but it got real, real bad after...

2.) ...Trump was elected. Him winning the election was a shot of weapons-grade steroids into the ass of these regressive movements. He validated and emboldened them. He made them feel not only okay about being bigoted, but morally good for it.

That's my thoughts, at least.

[rayiner]

> Trump was elected. Him winning the election was a shot of weapons-grade steroids into the ass of these regressive movements.

It’s actually exactly the opposite. We lurched left in a very short time. As recently as 2007, a plurality even of Hispanics said there were “too many immigrants” in the US. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/19/latinos-hav.... Little more than a decade later, every mainstream Democratic candidate is running on providing universal healthcare to people who immigrate illegally.

[leftyted]

> In general, this is a reactionary movement from the elite class of society(straight, white, cis people) to keep a death grip on the social and systemic power they see being taken from them in the form of diversity, equality, feminism, etc. This has been happening for a long time now, but it got real, real bad after...

Trump's base is decidedly not elite. It's working class people who live outside cities.

The elites live in cities and have graduate degrees. Very few of them voted for Trump.

[krapp]

>Trump's base is decidedly not elite. It's working class people who live outside cities.

Define "city," "elite" and "working class."

Because if Trump's base primarily consisted of people who lived in areas with, let's just say, populations under 10,000 without access to municipal services and who primarily farm and live off the land, then he would never have had enough support to carry the primaries. Clearly a significant number of his supporters live in what most people would consider a "city."

According to these articles, at least[0,1], Trump's primary support was among relatively affluent Republicans. It shouldn't be a surprise, either. Trump is an elite, a billionaire businessman. Obviously, other elites were going to support him.

That said, I would agree with GP in a general sense, that we're seeing a hard right-wing, reactionary shift primarily driven (as right-wing shifts typically are in the West) by white cis Christian males fighting to maintain their cultural power in the face of demographic and progressive change. However, I don't think there's necessarily a strong correlation in this movement to urban/rural or high/middle/low income lines, although I could be convinced by data to the contrary.

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/0...

[1]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps...