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The 1920s version of the Ku Klux Klan had more adherents in the North and the West than in the South. Republican state governments in Colorado, Indiana, and Oregon were Klan dominated, as were the Democratic state governments of Texas and Oklahoma. The organization was more anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish than anti-black, especially outside the South. The religious bigotry was amplified by Nordic supremacy theories and anti-Semitic literature that Henry Ford peddled.

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.