Trump and the KKK, Part 2

The controversy surrounding the KKK's endorsement of Donald Trump has probably led to some confusion, with a lot of people wondering "the KKK is still a thing? Isn't that only in that bad South?" While David Duke operated mainly in Louisiana and the original incarnation of the white terrorist group known as the Ku Klux Klan was organized by defeated confederate officers after the Civil War, the reborn Klan had a much larger reach. The following is a story of moralism gone astray, because if your underlying values are terrible then the empirical manifestations are also likely to be terrible.

As I alluded in my last post, all the dog whistles and coded language about race used by prior candidates for the GOP to stoke white supremacy and racial resentment seem to have broken through to explicit and conscious appeals to hate and fear. This is the first big clawing back of racism into our political discourse without any cover. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960s, strong organized opposition from African-Americans, Latinos, and other non-whites together with white Liberal allies had made overt racism unacceptable in public. Republican strategists such as Lee Atwater learned to camouflage their language while wooing southern segregationists and bigots across White America.

Why is it resurfacing now? It is pretty obvious even if the republican base, that turned into the tea party, that now supports Trump refuses to admit that most if not all of them are motivated by the same feelings of white supremacy and racial resentment as always, it is just visible now. The strong countervailing forces that could keep this kind of racism in check have atrophied over time in relation to the thundering of movement conservatism. While today's policies of mass incarceration, discriminatory policing, voter suppression and others that disproportionately affect minority communities were put in place with the same sort of veiled racism that was espoused by the politicians who enacted them. "Tough on crime" and "war on drugs" have been buzzwords used to send thousands upon thousands of young men to prison with lengthy sentences without even a halfhearted attempt at rehabilitation. Meanwhile immigration has been demonized simply by adding the word "illegal" in front of it to stigmatize anyone driven off their land by subsidized agribusiness and into the US desperate for work.

It is always difficult to put concrete explanations for why social movements arise and mature, but at least we have history as a guide. The following posts will include a series of excerpts from William Leuchtenburg's The Perils of Prosperity that I also excerpted for the "We Have Been Here Before" series (Part 1, 2, and 3). Professor Leuchtenburg included a chapter on political fundamentalism that I feel is important to retell in this election season.