Tag Archives: KKK

Return of the KKK

James Madison–my favorite Indiana historian, not my favorite Founding. Father–has recently written a column documenting what many of us have come to recognize: White Christian Nationalism is the contemporary KKK.

Madison should know. He wrote the book tracing the history of the Klan in Indiana.

The inauguration of Gov. Mike Braun and Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith sparks thoughts of the similar inauguration 100 years ago, on January 12, 1925, when Edward Jackson and Harold Van Orman took their oaths. The past never repeats itself exactly, but in this case there are lines that rhyme and questions that cause concern.

At the dinner following Gov. Jackson’s inauguration, William Herschell recited his beloved poem, “Ain’t God Good to Indiana.”  In the reception line next to the new governor stood Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, the man who boasted that “I am the law in Indiana.”  The two men had plans.

Madison notes that Jackson is considered the worst governor in Indiana history, and most Hoosiers know that Stephenson–Madison calls him “vile”–was a murderer and a blot on an already dark Indiana history.

The forces that created these two men remain with us. Indiana’s new governor and lieutenant governor are not Klansmen, but in the religious and political culture around them are scents of a century ago, when the Klan dominated the Hoosier state.

Those white, native-born Protestants who flocked to the Klan in the early 1920s called themselves 100% Americans. They boasted that only they were the real Americans. They created enemies to exclude and people to hate. Jews, African Americans, immigrants and, above all, Catholics were “the others.” By 1924, one political operative lamented, “Ideas of race and religion now dominate political thought.”

Those Klan boasts sound eerily like the rhetoric employed by MAGA cultists. Madison tells us that fear of Russian Bolsheviks and German Huns widened to include all immigrants and non-White Christians. The Klan repeatedly insisted on “America First.”

In rhetoric that sounds a lot like Trump’s, the Klan claimed that the country was going to “hell in a handbasket.”

A Christian crusade was the remedy. The Klan promised to enforce prohibition, censor Hollywood films, stop backseat sex, end political corruption, and keep women closer to the kitchen, nursery, and Sunday school room. Giving women the ballot, reported the Klan’s weekly newspaper, The Fiery Cross, “would foster masculine boldness and restless independence, which might detract from the modesty and virtue of womankind.”

Shades of today’s “tradwives.”

Madison explains that Klan members were convinced that they were the real, “100% Americans.” Much like today’s Christian Nationalists, they were motivated by White Supremacy. “Onward Christian Soldiers,” became the “beloved hymn of the Klan.”

Indiana had (and I think it is fair to say, still has) what Madison called “low expectations for government and high tolerance for corruption” –an environment that invited the state’s descent into a Klan stronghold.

Along with a governor, a majority—perhaps a supermajority—of the 1925 General Assembly were Klan members or sympathizers. Nearly all were white, Protestant and native born, joined by only four Catholics, four foreign born, and not a single African American or Jewish member.

The 1925 Klan legislature was mostly a bust. Internal divisions and self-aggrandizement led to only modest success in pushing through the Klan agenda. All assumed there would be other sessions to make good.

Madison’s column includes information about the resistance to the Klan. Stephenson’s conviction for rape and murder in 1925 added to the growing awareness of the Klan’s threat to basic American values, and Madison tells us that by 1930, the Klan was mostly gone in Indiana. “Nobody wanted to admit he’d ever belonged,” one reporter recalled.

Perhaps the most important observation in Madison’s essay is the following:

The intolerance in the last 50 years has come not from an out-of-date Klan but from a potpourri of sprawling and amorphous groups and movements, often linked to versions of Christian nationalism. As with the old Klan, today’s Christian nationalists tend toward binary choices of good and evil, toward a willingness to force their religious and cultural views on all of us, and toward use of government power in undemocratic and authoritarian ways that Indiana’s pioneers would have found appalling. Those pioneers wrote a Constitution in 1816 that contains the finest words ever penned on Indiana soil, including such commitments as “no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious societies, or modes of worship.”

Too many of our lawmakers have failed to heed that state Constitutional provision.

You really need to click through and read the whole essay–and then join us at tomorrow’s rally to kick off resistance to the re-emergence of the Klan, this time wearing red hats rather than sheets.

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Out Of The Closet

And so it begins. 

LGBTQ+ folks weren’t the only people hiding in closets. There were plenty of people with white sheets in those closets, and those people are emerging–this time, without the sheets. 

I recently posted that Trump’s rhetoric was received as permission, even encouragement, for the expression of bigotry and hatred. Friends who are nicer than I am remonstrated, insisting that not all Trump voters were motivated by racism and misogyny. (That may be true, although there’s a current Facebook meme that speaks to that protest: Question: What do we call the Germans who supported Hitler for reasons other than hatred of Jews? Answer: Nazis.)

The primary motivation for Trumpism is becoming very clear, and voters protesting that they based their choice on “the economy” (which is currently the best in the world) or who offer other, less reprehensible reasons need to face up to the fact that–like the businesspeople who once “went along” with the Klan in Indiana because it was dangerous or inconvenient to oppose it–have enabled the forces of bigotry Those few racists who were still closeted are now coming out in force.

Just a couple of headlines from a day or so ago underscore the point.

The Washington Post has reported on racist texts nationwide.

The FBI and authorities in several states are investigating racist text messages sent to Black people nationwide this week saying they would be brought to plantations to work as enslaved people and pick cotton.
 
People in at least a dozen states and D.C. have received the messages according to authorities and local media. The texts have spread alarm in the aftermath of a presidential election marked by President-elect Donald Trump and his campaign’s use of inflammatory language against minorities.
 
The origin of the messages is unknown, and it is unclear how many people received them. Reports from some states said the messages arrived Wednesday and appeared to target Black students at universities. Some, though not all, of the messages claimed to be from a Trump supporter or “the Trump administration,” according to screenshots shared on social media and local news.

Black people all across the country have reported receiving these messages, which evidently varied a bit in wording. All of them, however, ordered recipients to “report to a plantation and work in slavery.” Several claimed to have been from Trump supporters or Donald Trump or the Trump campaign.

It bears noting that these messages targeting Black people were facilitated by a worrisome lack of privacy protections, and the sharing of personal information–some in the form of lists, and others enabled by the broadcast messaging ability of cellphone carriers.

Closer to home, IU Students reported receipt of similar messages.

Not that it is comforting–far from it– but it is undeniable that the wave of fascism sweeping this country is part and parcel of a global phenomenon.

In Amsterdam, Israeli soccer fans were recently attacked. At least 62 people were arrested in conjunction with football contests, according to police, as a result of clashes that erupted overnight after a Europa League football match.

“In several places in the city, supporters were attacked, abused and pelted with fireworks. Riot police had to intervene several times, protect Israeli supporters and escort them to hotels,” said Amsterdam officials.

Social media platforms were flooded with unverified images purported to be of the violence, but confirmed details of the clashes were few, according to AFP.

The UN called the violence “very troubling” while Germany foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said it was “terrible” and “deeply shameful.”

Although nothing excuses the violence, the Israeli fans were hardly innocent victims: unverified video on social media appeared to show some Maccabi Tel Aviv fans chanting in Hebrew: “Finish the Arabs! We’re going to win!”

The human family appears to be devolving into a tribalism that many of us had thought was waning. The prevalence of global populism, the widespread rejection of civilized and humane behavior and the unleashing of old and ugly hatreds threatens to engulf us at a time when the existential threat posed by climate change requires a unified global response. 

To call these times perilous is a serious understatement.

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“Don’t Know Much About History”

That old Sam Cooke tune should be Justice Alito’s theme song.

Distortion–or flat-out lying–about history hasn’t previously been a feature of Supreme Court decisions, although it’s nothing new in political discourse. (Remember the people who argued against same-sex marriage by insisting that marriage “has always been between one man and one woman,” despite the fact that the statement was demonstrably false? Even if you ignore biblical history, more than half of the world still recognizes plural marriage.)

Alito’s recitation of history in Dobbs has been rebutted by historians, and its falsity was recently the subject of a lengthy essay in the Guardian. 

As the essay notes, Alito claims that a reversal of Roe v Wade “restores the US to an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment [that] persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

This assertion, however, is easily disproven.As historians have exhaustively explained, early American common law (as in Britain) generally permitted abortions until “quickening”, or perceptible foetal movement, usually between 16 to 20 weeks into a pregnancy. Connecticut was the first state to ban abortion after quickening, in 1821, which is roughly two centuries after the earliest days of American common law. It was not until the 1880s that every US state had some laws restricting abortion, and not until the 1910s that it was criminalised in every state. In the wake of Dobbs, social media was awash with examples from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers that clearly refuted Alito’s false assertion, sharing examples of midwives and doctors legally advertising abortifacients, Benjamin Franklin’s at-home abortion remedies, and accounts of 19th-century doctors performing “therapeutic” (medically necessary) abortions.

The essay also emphasized that anti-abortion fervor was not motivated by the moral or religious beliefs generally cited by anti-choice activists.

In fact, the first wave of anti-abortion laws were entangled in arguments about nativism, eugenics and white supremacism, as they dovetailed with a cultural panic that swept the US in the late 19th and early 20th century as a result of the vast changes in American society wrought by the conflict. This panic was referred to at the time in shorthand as “race suicide”

The increasing traction today of the far-right “great replacement theory”, which contends that there is a global conspiracy to replace white people with people of colour, and has explicitly motivated white supremacist massacres in the US, is often said to have originated with a French novel called The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. Published in 1973, the same year that Roe v Wade enshrined American women’s rights to reproductive autonomy, it is a dystopian account of “swarthy hordes” of immigrants sweeping in and destroying western civilisation. But there were many earlier panics over “white extinction”, and in the US, debates around abortion have been entangled with race panic from the start. 

As a similar post at FiveThirtyEight.com put it,” the anti-abortion movement, at its core, has always been about upholding white supremacy.”

Historians point to the numerous newspapers, lectures and sermons that led to the original criminalization of abortion by warning that Catholics and other foreign-born immigrants were likely to outnumber Protestant, native-born Americans. The essay cited one representative example– a 1903 editorial pointing out that the Protestant population of the US was increasing by 8.1% while the Catholic population was increasing by 21.8%, and characterizing those statistics as an “alarming condition of things.” The article noted that there were “on the average more than five abortions a month, none of them in Catholic families”. In case the message wasn’t sufficiently clear, the piece was headlined “Religion and Race Suicide”.

When the resurgent Ku Klux Klan paraded in Louisiana in 1922, they bore banners that read “White Supremacy”, “America First”, “One Hundred Per Cent American”, “Race Purity” and “Abortionists, Beware!” People are sometimes confused by the Klan’s animus against abortionists, or impute it to generalised patriarchal authoritarianism, but it was much more specifically about “race purity”: white domination can only be maintained by white reproduction.

The article is lengthy, but well worth your time to read; it contains a meticulous recitation of the thoroughly racist roots of opposition to abortion. My only quibble is that It gives only a nod to the White male patriarchy embedded in the numerous religious dogmas that require the subordination and submission of women. Without the benefit of that moral “fig leaf,” I doubt whether its clearly racist roots would have carried the movement so far.

I do absolutely agree with the essay’s conclusion:

The assault on women’s rights is part of the wider move to reclaim the “commanding place” in society for a small minority of patriarchal white men. And, as Alito’s decision shows, where legal precedent and other justifications cannot be found, myth will fill the vacuum.

No matter how ahistorical that myth…

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Behind the Misleading Labels

One of my pet peeves–okay, one of the aspects of American political debate that absolutely drives me up the wall–is the substitution of labels for adult argumentation. We see the use of labels to dismiss factual disputes from all parts of the political spectrum, with right-wingers accusing Democrats–and even moderate Republicans– of being “socialists” and”Marxists” and left-wingers calling everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders   “fascists.”

In fact, I just did that too–I labeled by using the terms “left” and “right”–terms that aren’t remotely accurate. What passes for the far left in the U.S. is middle-of-the-road in Europe and elsewhere, and while we have definitely seen a growing number of American fascists, most of the screamers on what we think of as the political right are just our usual, garden-variety racists and White Nationalists.

These right and left labels are especially misleading, because what constitutes left and right in American politics has shifted. Dramatically.

I’m an excellent example. When I ran for Congress in 1980, as a (pro-choice, pro-gay-rights) Republican, I was routinely labeled “too conservative.” Today, I’m just as routinely accused of being a lefty/ socialist,  although I haven’t changed my political philosophy. (I have changed my positions on a couple of issues, as a result of learning more about them, but I haven’t changed my underlying approach to issues of liberty and the role of government.)

In other words, while I stood philosophically still, the popular definitions of “left” and “right” changed. The Overton Window shifted.

In a recent column, Paul Krugman considered how–and why– that change occurred.

As anyone with a living braincell has observed, today’s GOP bears little to no resemblance to the party I once belonged to, and its transformation from a respectable center-right political party to the irrational and frightening cult it has become is a vivid illustration of how misleading those labels really are.

Krugman reminds us that the change occurred over many years; Trump was just the most recent manifestation. He rquoted congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, who warned us in 2016 that the GOP had become “an insurgent outlier” that rejected “facts, evidence and science” and didn’t accept the legitimacy of political opposition. And he noted a 2019 survey of international political parties intended to determine their commitment to basic democratic principles and minority rights. The G.O.P., the survey found, “looks nothing like center-right parties in other Western countries. What it resembles, instead, are authoritarian parties like Hungary’s Fidesz or Turkey’s A.K.P.”

Such analyses have frequently been dismissed as over the top and alarmist. Even now, with Republicans expressing open admiration for Viktor Orban’s one-party rule, I encounter people insisting that the G.O.P. isn’t comparable to Fidesz. (Why not? Republicans have been gerrymandering state legislatures to lock in control no matter how badly they lose the popular vote, which is right out of Orban’s playbook.) Yet as Edward Luce of The Financial Times recently pointed out, “at every juncture over last 20 years the America ‘alarmists’ have been right.”

Why has this happened?

Krugman compared the GOP transformation to populist emergences in Europe, and found those comparisons unhelpful. His ultimate conclusion was persuasive.

It’s a puzzle. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking for historical precursors — cases in which right-wing extremism rose even in the face of peace and prosperity. And I think I’ve found one: the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

It’s important to realize that while this organization took the name of the post-Civil War group, it was actually a new movement — a white nationalist movement to be sure, but far more widely accepted, and less of a pure terrorist organization. And it reached the height of its power — it effectively controlled several states — amid peace and an economic boom.

What was this new K.K.K. about? I’ve been reading Linda Gordon’s “The Second Coming of the K.K.K.: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition,” which portrays a “politics of resentment” driven by the backlash of white, rural and small-town Americans against a changing nation. The K.K.K. hated immigrants and “urban elites”; it was characterized by “suspicion of science” and “a larger anti-intellectualism.” Sound familiar?

OK, the modern G.O.P. isn’t as bad as the second K.K.K. But Republican extremism clearly draws much of its energy from the same sources.

And because G.O.P. extremism is fed by resentment against the very things that, as I see it, truly make America great — our diversity, our tolerance for difference — it cannot be appeased or compromised with. It can only be defeated.

It’s hard to argue with Krugman’s diagnosis. It’s even harder to see just how the rest of us can recapture our governing institutions. If we don’t, however, in short order that “fascist” label will become horrifyingly accurate.

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Hope And Fear In Rural America

At this point in America’s political history, it’s a rare person who hasn’t seen those ubiquitous red and blue maps. Different states show different voting patterns, but there is one element the political maps all have in common: cities with a half-million residents or more are all bright blue, and rural areas are all red.

Suburbs may be turning purple, but not rural America.

A number of political operatives have been counseling Democrats to engage with rural voters, to try to bridge the cultural divide between “cosmopolitan” urbanites and “resentful” rural dwellers. My own response to those entreaties has ranged from tepid to cold–after all, wouldn’t it be a waste of resources better deployed on efforts to turn out the millions who didn’t bother to go to the polls in 2016? Given what I have read about the deep connection between rural voters and the GOP, outreach to those precincts seemed–and still seems–unlikely to change many votes.

That said, an eloquent column from the New York Times has made me reconsider.

George Goehl runs a federation of community-based organizations across the country that bring poor and working-class people together to win economic and racial justice, and he has a warning: when liberals and progressives ignore rural Americans, they clear the way for the White Nationalists who are already there.

This summer I visited a bunch of small towns across the country, and I saw signs that white nationalists are becoming more active. Just drive by the town square in Pittsboro, N.C., at 5 p.m. on any given Saturday and you are likely to seewhite nationalists rallying to protect a Confederate monument.

This weekend, I’ll head back home to southern Indiana, where members of the 3 Percenters, a far-right militia, showed up with guns and knives at the Bloomington Farmers Market earlier this year. The leader of the white supremacist organization American Identity Movement even paid a visit. I’ve been organizing for 20 years in rural communities and have never seen this level of public activity by white supremacist groups.

Goehl’s organization works in both urban and rural communities, and he warns against the assumption that rural minds cannot be changed.

As part of this work, our organizers had over 10,000 conversations with people in small towns across the country over the past year. We spoke with neighbors in Amish country, visited family farms in Iowa and sat on front porches in Appalachia — communities that have experienced hard economic times and went solidly for Donald Trump in 2016.

Although these communities may be fertile ground for the Trump administration and other white nationalist organizations, they are also places where people can come together across race and class to solve the big problems facing everyday people. That starts by recognizing one another’s humanity — and with honest conversations….

For those who have given up on rural communities: Please reconsider. So many of these places need organizing to win improved conditions. Despite the stereotypes, rural people are not static in their political views or in the way they vote. Single white rural women and young rural white people represent two of the greatest leftward swings in the 2018 midterms, moving 17 and 16 points respectively toward Democrats. They played a key role in Democratic wins across the Midwest.

Goehl concedes that a substantial number of rural residents are “as racist as you would expect,” and notes the resurgence of the KKK in rural America. On the other hand, he insists  that plenty of rural folks reject efforts to foster racial resentments.

In June of 2018, my organization’s affiliates staged nearly 780 rallies across the country to protest the family separation crisis. Half of the rallies were in counties that voted for Donald Trump. Small towns like Angola, Ind., and Ketchum, Idaho, with populations of 8,000 and 2,700 respectively, were among the communities that came together to support migrant families.

People followed those rallies with rural cookouts, deep in so-called Trump Country, to gather and talk about family and the plight of migrants, and pass the hat to post bond for migrant families.

It’s good to be reminded that no constituency is monolithic. Turning those red expanses blue, however–or even a pale shade of purple–still looks like a very steep climb.

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