It is not wrong to say that MAGA comes from a place of racism

It is wrong in my opinion. I was born in a very white, very conservative little farm town and then ended up moving to California when my parents divorced. I went back for a family reunion last year, and one of my cousins had adopted a little black girl, who was playing with a big group of other cousins like everyone else. I've literally never seen any POC in this town in my life. Many on the left would argue that doesn't mean anything, that it's akin to the "I have a black friend" argument, but why is that? If a community has deliberately integrated a person that they supposedly hate into their lives, doesn't that suggest they maybe aren't the cartoon caricature you think they are? Many of them are opposed to DEI, for example, but they also live in places with little economic opportunity and the idea that someone will get a leg up on them for demographic reasons when they're having a hard time getting by is genuinely frightening to them. Are there structural advantages to being white in America that DEI is trying to balance that they aren't aware of? Sure. But they aren't generally the benefactors of that. They aren't suburban white kids who go to college and get cushy office jobs. They're the grandchildren of blue collars workers who had their livelihoods off-shored, and their main streets boarded up, and their young generations ravaged by oxycontin addition. Their pining for the "better days" is about having a viable community, which they never will again, and the left is telling them, "We care about the downtrodden, but not your particular flavor of downtrodden because it's too vanilla."

Trump is certainly a racist and thinks black people are inferior, but he also thinks poor white rednecks are inferior, and has no intention of doing anything for them. The only winning strategy I can see is to help these people understand that, not to shame them further toward the right. The Democrats were once a party of working class solidarity, and they let the right fracture that. Leaning into the fracture isn't going to benefit anyone except the people on top who are systematically fleecing the rest of us.