Monday, November 28, 2011

Hooded Progressivism

Very interesting:

Hooded Progressivism - Reason Magazine: In 2005, most people are barely aware that there has been more than one KKK, let alone that the most notable Invisible Empire would have turned 90 years old this weekend. But the second Klan was radically different from both the Klan that emerged after the Civil War and the Klan that battled the civil rights movement in the '60s. It had its greatest strength outside the South, and approximately half its followers lived not in the countryside but in cities. Most of its members eschewed illicit violence, and when it was violent its victims often as not were white. (In some communities, violence was more likely to be wielded against the Klan than by it.) As you'd expect, it was racist, nativist, prohibitionist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic, but its worldview wasn't always consistent or coherent: It may have been a united organization, something that was only barely true of the first Klan and was never true of the third, but it adopted different issues and tactics in different parts of the country, making it much harder to stereotype than its predecessor and its successors.

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