re: #10 erik_t
ce of a new America in which many older-stock Americans intuit they will be left behind.

“It is precisely these disaffected whites—especially those who didn’t go to college—who form the Republican voting base. John McCain got 58 percent of noncollege-white votes in 2008. The GOP polls even higher among that group today, but the party can only sustain those numbers as long as it gives voice to alienation. Birtherism, the claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, expressed the feeling of many that power has shifted into alien hands. That feeling will not be easily quelled by Republican electoral success, because it is based on a deep sense of dispossession and disinheritance.”
-David Frum
It’s about maintaining the power structure they are familiar with, so to maintain power, they stoke the fears and resentments of those who have to compete with minorities and women.