How Trump’s GOP has shackled itself to conspiratorial fears about racial extinction

A Washington Post columnist explained in the wake of the Christchurch mosque massacres how "white identity politics" have come to define the modern Republican Party.

Plum Line blogger Paul Waldman noted that the alleged shooter referred to Donald Trump "as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose" in his manifesto.

"What is coming to define a good portion of the Republican Party is a sense that white people are not just losing something today but are under the threat of cultural, political and even physical annihilation," he added.

Though white supremacists take the philosophy to the extreme with their fears surrounding "white genocide," less-extreme forms result in "people being increasingly drawn to white identity politics."

In her forthcoming book entitled "White Identity Politics," political scientist Ashley Jardina distinguishes between simple racism and the organizing factor behind such ideology.

"White identity politics is about whiteness becoming an organizing political factor, a group identity that leads people to seek certain things and favor certain policies because of how they will affect white people," Waldman summarized.

White people who ascribe to such politics are no longer just hostile towards people of other races, ethnicities and religions — instead, they "fear that whites will be overrun, oppressed and eventually eliminated, and the solution is in turn to banish minorities from wherever white people are feeling this threat, whether it’s the United States, Europe or New Zealand."

Those politics connect white supremacists and white nationalists with people who would never define themselves as such but are afraid that the changing demographics of the United States means they'll no longer have a place within it," Waldman added.

From calling the Charlottesville neo-Nazis "very fine people" to hiring John Bolton as his national security adviser, Trump has steered the GOP firmly in the direction of white identity politics, he argued.

Read the entire column via the Post.