“Bill Clinton excused so many Democrat politicians having been members of the Klan saying that you HAD to belong to get elected.”
Other than Robert Byrd, who does that apply to, exactly? What are some names of these “many Democrat politicians”.
This is the sort of claim that has become habitual around here. Conservatives have become willing to emulate the Left’s habit of saying anything if it advances the agenda, facts be damned.
Of course that would require actually knowing the complicated facts of history in the first place. And that isn’t what talk radio and assorted pop “historians” are peddling. Which is where a lot of this bs originates.
I can produce names. How about Edward Jackson, Governor of Indiana? Or Clarence Morley, Governor of Colorado? They were involved with the Klan. But they were also Republicans, so that may not fit the party line.
Fool in Paradise does mention one salient point: the Klan was anti-Catholic. At least the Second Klan was, the one that arose in 1915. That Klan was also anti-alcohol, and had helped pass Prohibition, along with their allies the WCTU.
So if the Klan and the Democratic Party are one and the same, a currently popular freeper meme, how is it that Catholic Al Smith was the Presidential nominee of 1928? And the 1924 nominee, John Davis, was someone who had openly denounced the Klan, and had defended black voting rights when he was Wilson’s solicitor general. Maybe they failed to get the “we are the Klan” memo.
Bill Clinton’s mentor
https://thefederalist.com/2016/09/19/why-is-hillary-clinton-still-honoring-a-segregationist-and-anti-semite/
FDR put a Klansman on the Supreme Court who ruled against Catholic schools using city school buses.
https://www.history.com/news/kkk-supreme-court-hugo-black-fdr
You do not preserve past achievement with lies. The rationalizations are indefensible!
The Second Klan had parallels in the European fascist movements, but due to its somewhat haphazard organization and internal corruption, it was not able to coalesce as a national force, as did Mussolini's Blackshirts. Had the Second Klan enjoyed an effective leader like Mussolini, they might have become a dominant national force. However, unlike Germany or Italy, a heterogeneous population would have led to a civil war. Catholics, Jews, Mormons, liberal Protestants (liberal in the theological sense), and labor unions would have opposed a Klan led Federal government. The industrial Northeast and Midwest, south Louisiana, Utah, and Hispanic dominated areas of the Southwest would have been in open revolt. The minorities probably represented one-third of the population, far higher than the 2% of the population that Jews represented in Germany.
The science fiction author Robert Heinlein wrote a series of Future History stories during the mid-20th Century in which a fundamentalist Protestant evangelist led a national movement that revived the Ku Klux Klan in all but name. The evangelist effectively overthrew the Federal government in the early 21st Century and appointed himself the First Prophet. His Future History was, of course, incorrect, as Marxist ideology, as changed by Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, has permanently altered the American political landscape.