The Democrats' Dilemma

Columnist Charles Lane writes incisively in the Thanksgiving 2016 issue of The Washington Post that we Democrats face a dilemma if we want to make any appeal to white working-class voters. As I've written before, we lost the election to Donald Trump because of "identity politics," defined Mr. Lane writes, as "messaging aimed not at voters broadly, but at Latinos, women, African Americans and the LGBT community as groups."

Voters in the white working-class who voted heavily for Trump did so not so much because of economic woes. Rather, they hanker after the cultural homogeneity they feel slipping away from them:

In rural areas, or small towns, where everyone speaks the same language, or practices the same customs, life can be simpler, more predictable, less frictional. Economists call these “compositional amenities,” and many people value them above the benefits of diversity — even above economic gains. ... Trump just got himself elected president with overwhelming support from non-college-educated whites in smaller cities and rural counties by telling them he would build a wall on the Mexican border, impose “extreme vetting” on would-be immigrants and deport large numbers of the undocumented.

That's a big problem for Democrats:

The Democrats’ dilemma, then, is this: They can make only limited political gains with an economic pitch to the white working class, unless they adjust on immigration and other issues of identity too, probably.

Yet this would require compromising on what the party defined as matters of basic justice and tolerance, and turn off voters from their racially and ethnically diverse “coalition of the ascendant.” 

Some Democrats warn that "conceding on identity politics would be a capitulation to 'white supremacy'," but not making any concessions might doom the party in future elections. What is the right answer here?