Are they racists? Or difference-ists?

In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf puts a new spin on the Left's insistence that racism infuses the Right.

I admit to being gobsmacked when Donald Trump built a political coalition based largely on intolerance.  Throughout the early months of 2016, I expected that his GOP primary campaign would implode when voters got past the TV-celebrity superficiality and realized what an unworthy person he is for the presidency.  Instead, rival after rival dropped out, and he won the requisite number of delegates to secure the nomination - and it wasn't really very close.  At that time, I thought, "This will destroy the Republican Party."  I fully expected that huge swaths of principled conservatives would either stay home in November, or would write in a different candidate, or would vote for the Democratic candidate.  But the Republican Party, by and large, fell in behind Trump.  I also was confident that the well-known, qualified and respected Hillary Clinton would rout Trump in the general election, perhaps by a historic margin, as non-Republican voters were given the opportunity to vote against this resuscitator of the Know-Nothing movement.  Again, I was badly wrong.

So in the wake of Trump's unlikely victory, to which there is still ample time for the adjective "calamitous" to attach itself, people like me are left to look back and ask, "What happened?  What did I miss?"

In Vox, Jane Coaston has a straightforward answer: what I missed is that racism is still alive and well on the Right; the Left has been pointing this out for many years, and people like me either have been deaf and blind to it or have been wilfully ignorant.  She marshals some evidence, which I'd classify as so-so.  She does make one major point which, in light of Trump's triumph, seems difficult to dispute:

But the kind of racism that’s most common in movement conservatism — by which I mean the political project of conservatism, with the intent of winning elections and changing policy and law — is what I call “instrumentalized” racism, the deliberate use of racism and racist tropes for the sole purpose of winning votes and elections.
People who engage in instrumentalized racism do so not necessarily because they themselves are “racist” on an individual level, but because they believe that voters will respond — and perhaps only respond — to racism. 

Friedersdorf has written a response to Coaston in The Atlantic.  In an article entitled, "What Ails the Right Isn't (Just) Racism", he proposes a different theory to explain why so many voters, including a critical number in key states, voted for Trump in 2016.

Friedersdorf begins by putting his finger on the point of his disagreement with Coaston, referencing the passage from her Vox article which I've quoted above:

I concur that Trump, as surely as Lee Atwater, marshals racist tropes. But I doubt the last claim: “Instrumental racists” believe that voters will perhaps respond only to racism. And I doubt that voters, in fact, respond only to racism. Something distinct and deeper is at work. This deeper force explains nearly all of Trump’s most odious and irresponsible comments, not just the racist ones. It helps explain why so many conservatives and Republicans were caught off guard by Trump’s rise and the resonance of his bigotry. And it helps clarify what the left sees and doesn’t see about racism. Once leftists understand it, they will find it easier to defeat the identitarian right.

What is this "distinct" and "deeper" factor which animates many right-wing voters?  To answer that question, Friedersdorf refers to research done by political psychologist Karen Stenner, who has written a book entitled The Authoritarian Dynamic.  Friedersdorf describes Stenner's research in some detail, but for purposes of this post: she interviewed many people to get an inkling of where they fall on a spectrum of openness to diversity and new experiences.  Not surprisingly, people fall all along the continuum.  She termed the two poles of that spectrum "Authoritarian" and "Libertarian", with the former the least open to new experiences and people who differ from them.   Friedersdorf writes quite a bit about Stenner's conclusions; this passage seems to sum them up:

The crucial distinction between libertarians and authoritarians, Stemmer argued, is that “the former are excited and engaged and the latter frightened and unhinged by difference.”

Stenner found that authoritarians fear difference across a whole range of topics, which includes racial differences but goes far beyond them as well:

Stenner added that this intolerance manifests most commonly in demands for broad conformity, typically including “legal discrimination against minorities and restrictions on immigration; limits on free speech, assembly, and association; and the regulation of moral behavior, for example, via policies regarding school prayer, abortion, censorship, and homosexuality, and their punitive enforcement.” 

Stenner proposes an inside-double-quotes term for this type of intolerance: she calls it "difference-ism".

Why does Friedersdorf stress these differences between 'mere' racism and the more-encompassing authoritarianism?  He suggests that understanding "difference-ism" helps us to develop strategies to mitigate it.  For example:

“All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference … are the surest way to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors,” she wrote. The appearance of sameness matters, and “apparent variance in beliefs, values, and culture seem to be more provocative of intolerant dispositions than racial and ethnic diversity,” so “parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness” seems wise when possible.If you want an authoritarian neighbor to be maximally tolerant of the refugee family that moved in down the street, don’t relate how cool it was to go to their house and discover food and music unlike anything you’d ever encountered. Relate that despite growing up half a world away, their dedication to their children shows how much we humans all have in common.

 I am not completely sure what to make of Stenner's and Friedersdorf's thesis.  Probably my biggest handicap is that I don't actually know many authoritarians.  I don't travel in that milieu where order is revered and difference isn't tolerated.  I suppose I represent what may be a big problem: different pockets of America live with few or no interconnections.  We may as well be on different planets.