Pogo
Diamond Member
- Dec 7, 2012
- 123,708
- 22,749
Absolutely. Context is crucial. In the mid-19th century the Democratic Party was the home of "states rights" and decentralized government that, like several other parties that died off, failed to take a moral stand on the elephant-in-the-room question of Slavery, while the brand-new Republican Party pointedly took that issue on, drawing much of its base from the Whigs, which was one of those aforementioned dying parties. That made the RP the Liberals and the Democrats the Conservatives -- at that time. Interestingly it also made the RP the party of big activist government, which philosophy came with the Whigs (Lincoln himself had been one).
By the turn of the next century the RP was taking on the interests of the wealthy and the corporations while the DP was absorbing the Populist Party and movement, all of which shifted the bases of both parties. By the 1930s as one of the results of that, the black vote shifted from Republican to Democrat and has been there ever since. So when the Klan was re-started in 1915 after forty years dormant, its targets of blacks, Jews, immigrants, labor unions and Catholics --- were all constituents of the Democratic Party.
But again, lest we leave the wrong impression ---- the Klan didn't attack blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants and labor unions because they were "Democrats'"--- they attacked them because they were blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants and labor unions, and that represented change, which their hyperconservative mania could not handle.
>> In the end, the Klan was important not for what it did but for what it signified. It accomplished little but, as [Grand Wizard Hiram] Evans appreciated, it expressed the otherwise inarticulate rage and resentment of millions. At bottom its members' quarrel was with modernity. In particular, they objected to the rise of Catholics and Jews to positions of power and prominence; they feared that science would undermine the moral authority of the Bible; they worried that a "New Woman" would refuse to the submit to patriarchal authority; they worried that a "New Negro" would reject white supremacy. In matters trivial and profound they found themselves threatened with being passed by. The Klan captured perfectly, as did the Eugenics movement, their simultaneous sense of being entitled and endangered. << ---An American Fascism?
The fatal fallacy this board continually makes is to attempt to dress up literally everything that ever happens as either "Democrat" or "Republican" as if these are the two and only two elements in the Periodic Table, one or the other of which *MUST* be ascribed to every event and every person, world without end amen. Life just doesn't work that way. Not everything derives from politics. Some of the wags on this board take this politics-as-football game crapola WAY too seriously.
