Imagine you’re a white male who is neither strong, nor adaptable, and is dependent on his current social status for his self worth, and his social status is mainly dependent on white males being afforded more opportunity on balance than everyone else.
Changes in the economy means that you have less job security; and you now have to work harder and do more to maintain your work based social status.
Women and minorities are now afforded more opportunities due to the realization that discrimination against those groups is bad, women do better, have more power; in both In the workplace and relationships - even the jokes you can tell in the workplace, now that you’re not telling them to an almost exclusive white male group - are under attack.
Now that your having to rise or fall based on your ability; instead of having an inbuilt advantage in the system; your unique social identity, from bread winner, to high flyer are under attack.
On top of that, these other groups that your own prejudice perceive as inferior are now becoming more successful, having their own power, and wanting different things from you, and being empowered enough to get them; add another element to it.
So, even though they still have an inherent advantage over the others: their unique power and advantage has been eroded over others, and that reduction in power through the empowerment of others is perceived as unfair.
In reality, all that’s happened is that the monopoly on power has been broken a little, and all the people who defined themselves by that monopoly are now left unable to deal or adapt.
All that’s left now is often an angry knee jerk reactions to anything closely related to the reduction on that monopoly, nostalgia for how good life was in that monopoly, or various forms of attack on breaking that monopoly, from hysteria to hyperbolae now that they’ve lost a big part of their identity.
We should really be working out how to build a new identity, rather than trying to return a system where the identity was inherently built upon discrimination of others.
