The questions you’re asking are all good ones to ask. I’ll quote them here for the benefit of readers:
Yes, this is a backlash against the egalitarian advances of the Obama era. But what should we have done differently? They are angry that we wanted rights and angrier still that we got them. Should we have kept meekly silent, satisfied that even if we weren’t being treated equally, at least they weren’t killing (as many of) us anymore?
First, you lumped together several entirely different movements: “seeing women and Muslims and Jews and people of color and LGBTQ people demanding rights must have been very frightening to the white supremacists.” I think putting these all in one category is a mistake because they all involve completely different issues.
As far as black people (I don’t like the phrase “people of color” because it also makes a mess of things by conflating blacks, Asians, Hispanics and others, most of whom have very little in common as far as the kinds of issues they face in our society), I’ve described in the article I’d linked to earlier what they should’ve done. The shorter answer is stay the course. It was already succeeding. The Civil-Rights-Era strategy of de-emphasizing race (judging people based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin) had succeeded in decreasing racial polarization and racism on almost all fronts. This is why a majority of the nation was able to vote for a (half-)black President in 2008, something that would’ve been inconceivable even 20 years earlier. We lost the Obama consensus by aggressively going race-conscious in every facet of society and alienating poor whites. We fractured the working class, sent those whites fleeing to the Republican Party (and eventually to Trump) because they increasingly felt unwelcome in the Democratic fold, and the result is total gridlock, because nothing can get done to fight the status quo and the 1% when the poor and working class is polarized by race and divided across warring parties. To further the cause of African-American progress in this nation, the crucial next step is total integration between blacks and whites on every level (families, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, etc.), but race polarization has set things going in the exact opposite direction. The direct result is the resurgent white supremacist movement. These poor whites whose communities are suffering with unemployment, the painkiller crisis and escalating suicide rates are being excluded, told they’re “privileged” and made to feel unwelcome in what they perceive as their own country. How do you expect them to react? They’re embracing their race because it’s all they think they have and because they’re directly reacting to others who are aggressively embracing their own racial groups. It’s a dead-end, a path to a race war, which is the way we’re heading.
The Muslim issue is very different, of course. I’ve recently discussed here and here the real issues with Islam today, which are, in a word (I discuss more of the details in the posts I linked to), that mainstream Muslim beliefs today, as measured by reliable Pew surveys, are wildly inconsistent with the kinds of broad principles of tolerance (of women, LBGTQ people, Jews and others) that you’d otherwise support. We have to recognize that issue and deal with it. To say this another way, if an Evangelical Christian believed half the things that mainstream Muslims believe, you’d quickly condemn that person and their beliefs as an intolerant bigot, but because they’re Muslim, you take a totally different attitude. That doesn’t really make sense. We can’t bury our heads in the sand. The current suspicion of Islam in America, in other words, is not based on pure hatred of the Other. It is based on real incompatibilities between mainstream Muslim beliefs today and our own mainstream beliefs today. The solution to that, in my view, is an immigration policy that admits more skilled and educated people from all over (including Muslims) and fewer unskilled and uneducated people, because people with skills, education and good jobs are generally far less likely to go around partaking in extremism and espousing and acting on fringe beliefs. (Again, I discuss these issues in more detail in the posts I linked to, if you’re interested.)
As far as Jews are concerned, again, that’s an entirely different set of issues. In contrast to blacks or Muslims, Jews in America, like Asians in America, are heavily over-represented among those at the top of the economic ladder. Anti-Semitism exists for all kinds of irrational historical reasons, but one of the reasons that’s not quite so irrational involves the actions of Israel vis-a-vis Palestinians in the modern world. This is a cause that’s generally embraced by the same groups that you identify with and that fight other forms of what they see as oppression. I have no strong views on this question. The situation in the Middle East is a complicated mess, and there is plenty of fault to go around. But the point is that, whether rightly or wrongly (and that’s an open question), people conflate Israelis and Jews, and people (including many Jews themselves) also conflate the Jewish religion with the Nazi idea that Jewishness is a “race,” with Jews possessing tainted “Jewish blood” (whereas the historical reality is that Jewish populations have mixed genetically with local populations to varying extents throughout the centuries of their migrations, and so the genetic evidence that there is any real Jewish “race” is as weak as the genetic idea of “race” in general). The point is that with all this conflation going on, anti-Zionism and anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism wind up sometimes being part of the same package and sometimes being kept separate, and so people who dislike Israel often also tend to dislike Jews (many of whom, of course, uncritically support Israel, while others don’t). And other people dislike Jews simply because they’re seen as occupying positions of power in financial institutions, the media and among the liberal elites. I don’t know what the answer is here, but my main point is that anti-Semitism presents its own set of distinct questions.
Women and LBGTQ people are yet another separate category — really, two or probably three or four separate categories — and so there’s a lot to say there about each category, but one general point as far as women is that, in contrast to all the other groups identified, women and men generally occupy the same households, families and other environments, and so women aren’t seen as “other” in nearly the same way that some of these other groups might get perceived. In addition, in contrast to blacks-vs.-whites or Jews-vs.-gentiles or Muslims-vs.-Christians or whatever, there are real genetic and biological differences between men and women, of course. This means that emphasizing gender isn’t nearly as dangerous as emphasizing these other identities. Gender is something that’s naturally already emphasized in every human society today and throughout history. So the strategy for achieving greater gender quality is probably going to have to take that fact into account.
My bottom line point is that there is a whole tangle of issues here, and yet, with regard to the main Charlottesville issue, which is race, of course, the approach the anti-white racists have taken over the past few years has hurt the cause of African-Americans far more than it has helped. I fear that that will become even more apparent with time.
