It would have been far more truthful for the congresswoman to have admitted the fact that all those who wore sheets a long time ago lifted them to wear Democratic Party clothing.  Yes, the Ku Klux Klan was established by the Democratic Party.  Yes, the Ku Klux Klan murdered thousands of Republicans — African-American and white – in the years following the Civil War.  Yes, the Republican Party and a Republican President, Ulysses Grant, destroyed the KKK with their Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

How did the Ku Klux Klan re-emerge in the 20th century?  For that, the Democratic Party is to blame.

It was a racist Democrat President, Woodrow Wilson, who premiered Birth of a Nation in the White House.  That racist movie was based on a racist book written by one of Wilson’s racist friends from college.  In 1915, the movie spawned the modern-day Klan, with its burning crosses and white sheets.

Inspired by the movie, some Georgia Democrats revived the Klan.  Soon, the Ku Klux Klan again became a powerful force within the Democratic Party.  The KKK so dominated the 1924 Democratic Convention that Republicans, speaking truth to power, called it the Klanbake.  In the 1930s, a Democrat President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, appointed a Klansman, Senator Hugo Black (D-AL), to the U.S. Supreme Court.  In the 1950s, the Klansmen against whom the civil rights movement struggled were Democrats.  The notorious police commissioner Bull Connor, who attacked African-Americans with dogs and clubs and fire hoses, was both a Klansman and the Democratic Party’s National Committeeman for Alabama.  Starting in the 1980s, the Democratic Party elevated a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), to third-in-line for the presidency.

I have one quibble with all this.  It focuses too much on the partisan aspect of the KKK and not enough on its ideological drive.  After all, modern day Democrats could just claim that the Klan represented the conservative wing of the Democratic party.  This would be an error.

While most members of the Klan held what would be termed conservative views on social issues, they were hardly purveyors of Burkean conservative values.  In fact the Klan typified the Progressive/Populist movement to a tee: “conservative” socially but decidedly left-wing economically and politically.  They supported government intrusion into the economy and were backers of the New Deal.  Jesse Walker explains some of the areas of overlap between the Progressive movement and the Klan:

1. Progressivism had roots in the Protestant pietist tradition, and its partisans were frequently interested in reforming individuals as well as institutions. It’s a quick jump from there to the moral authoritarianism described in Charles Alexander’s books. Jane Addams, the Social Gospel activist who played such a big role in passing protective labor regulations and compulsory schooling laws, was also a critic of the “debased form of dramatic art, and a vulgar type of music” that a young person might find in the five-cent theaters, writing that it was “astounding that a city allows thousands of its youth to fill their impressionable minds with these absurdities.” Prohibition, that Klan kause kelebre, reached its height as a cause during the Progressive Era, complete with muckraking exposés of the “whiskey ring” and culminating with the passage of the eighteenth amendment in 1919.

2. Racism also had a foothold among the progressives. It might be tempting to argue that bigots like Woodrow Wilson, who introduced Jim Crow rules to the federal government, were merely progressive in some areas and reactionary in others. But the American eugenics movement was tied closely to the progressives’ drive for “scientific” reform, and its heyday covered both the Progressive Era and the ’20s. Politicians offered eugenic arguments not just for laws that banned miscegenation and allowed authorities to sterilize the allegedly unfit, but for restrictions on immigration from southern and central Europe.

3. The progressives and the Klan shared an interest in mandating public education and eliminating urban political machines. The civic-activist historians tell us that the rank-and-file Klansman’s interest in such reforms was frequently a sincere response to corruption and inadequate schooling, though it’s clear that their urban proposals owed at least something to their fear of immigrants, and that their education proposals were transparantly anti-Catholic. If the Klan’s motives were not purely nativist, then neither were the progressives’ purely benign: Just as the Klansmen sometimes shared the progressives’ hopes, the latter sometimes shared the Klansmen’s fears.

4. In the late 1910s the Klan was a small regional organization. In the early ’20s it was large and national. There’s a number of reasons why it made this leap, but the biggest may be the effects of World War I. This too marked a connection with progressivism.

As the historian William Leuchtenburg and the economist Murray Rothbard have argued, Wilson’s wartime policies were an outgrowth, not a negation, of Progressive Era politics. During the conflict, government planners and “enlightened” corporate leaders replaced a relatively free market with a heavily regimented economy, while intellectuals hoped, in Leuchtenburg’s words, to adopt “the same sort of centralized directing now employed to kill their enemies abroad for the new purpose of reconstructing their own life at home.”

Jonah Goldberg discussed some of the nastier, racist elements of the Progressive movement in Liberal Fascism. Justin Logan also has taken a look at the links between the Klan and Progressives, and there is other literature that touches upon this phenomenon.

Long story short, the Klan were largely comprised of people we would term statists.  This is not to say, of course, that all Progressives were racists or klansman, but the idea that the KKK was some kind of right-wing group is not anywhere near accurate.

The nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights group announced Thursday that it has organized a boycott of Arizona in the wake of the state’s new lawtargeting illegal immigrants. The National Council of La Raza, along with 19 other labor and civil rights groups, will pull money and meetings out of the state and are asking all companies and organizations to move major events and conferences planned there to other venues. Specifically, La Raza wants Major League Baseball to renege on its promise to hold the 2011 All-Star Game in Phoenix.

As a Hispanic American I’ve never, not once, found that La Raza could properly identify me. Their name is a non-starter. Imagine if a bunch of white dudes started an organization called “The Race.” Yeah. That doesn’t sound extreme…at all….Do Boycotts like this ever work?

A young mother finds that the IRS has withheld several hundred dollars from her paycheck as a “penalty” for not having health insurance. (Despite whatever incentives are in the law, this woman did not want to fill out the forms or apply for aid, or she had other more pressing financial problems to address. In short, she simply didn’t want or perhaps did not have the time and resources to purchase health insurance.)

Because of the IRS “penalty,” the young mother cannot pay her rent. She and her child are suddenly without a place to live.

Constitutional legal foundations (and perhaps some state attorneys general) step in to represent the young mother. Their argument should go something like this: The woman’s constitutional rights under the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th Amendments have been violated . . .

A bill expected to pass the House today with overwhelming Democratic support would accomplish something peculiar for a liberal republic in the 21st century: It would partly disenfranchise a portion of one state’s residents, create a parallel government for those meeting a legislated criterion of ethnic purity, and would portend the transfer of public assets, land, and political power from those who fail to satisfy the standard of ethnic purity to those who do. For these reasons and many more, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act richly deserves opposition.

Apparently, this one doesn’t. Democrat Mass. Senatorial candidate Martha Coakley’s aide pushes Weekly Standard reporter down, then continues to assault him as he seeks to question Coakley. Story here.  Let’s see, assault and battery, civil rights violations . . . yes, yes, all kinds of fun things to consider here. Has Coakley fired this thug? No, she’s blaming the incident on “Republican stalkers.” Good grief.

The reporter thinks this might be the perp.  Hey, Chicago style politics is all the rage these days! And Coakley is the Mass. AG! Holy, Moley!

**UPDATE: BigGovernment.com is saying yes, Michael Meehan is the perp. And surprise, surprise, he’s an Obama appointee – for the Broadcasting Board of Governors which oversees federal news operations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe no less!! He also worked with NARAL – hey, he’s used to violence. And, you gotta love this line by BIG G:

“His (Meehan’s) Senate confirmation hearing should be a hoot.”

I could not make up much better stuff than this. Thank you Mr. Meehan, you may have just handed the election to Scott Brown.

“Education, after all, is typically described as a core, and possibly the core, state responsibility . . . Homeschooling is now such an entrenched practice, recriminalization is not a viable option in any event.” ~ Robin L. West, Georgetown University Law Center

Not a “viable option?” Well at least I can rest peacefully tonight knowing that jack-booted thugs won’t be knocking my daughter’s door down any time soon to arrest her for teaching “the state’s children.” (My daughter would want to know where the state was when she was going through those labor pains to deliver “their” children. By the way Professor, the youngest one has something stinky in her diaper – could you lend a hand here?) Professor West thinks that more government regulation of homeschooling is a good idea:

As the political philosopher and homeschool critic Robert Reich has persuasively argued, curricular review would give the state a way to ensure that the academic content is such as to protect the children’s interest in both acquiring the necessary skills for active, autonomous, and responsible citizenship in adulthood, and in being exposed to diverse and more liberal ways.

Well, gee whiz, that approach certainly has worked wonders in the public schools, hasn’t it? Diverse and more liberal – that’s what this is really all about. Professor West doesn’t like the fact that “the state” is losing the opportunity to indoctrinate OUR children.  Maybe she’s bucking for Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. More here.

I’m curious to know other peoples’ opinions.  I have yet to make my own, for a number of different reasons.  Is the gay community doing the same thing feminism did, where “equal rights” really meant “the same as”?  In more urban/progressive places, are there really levels of discrimination that merit a march on the Mall (the ultimate form of protest)?  Someone once voiced the opinion that feminism was a way for ugly women to feel important about themselves and get laid.  Is all this gay activism a chance for, in a similar manner, legalized licentiousness? That same (gay) person opined that the only people who would benefit from gay marriage is divorce lawyers. Does the right to marriage (complete with white dress and cake topped with cheesy plastic figurines) constitute as a civil right?

Thoughts?

The truth is that corporate moguls push for tort reform because they have little use for a civil justice system that puts the little guy on the same plane as the rich and powerful. These so-called fiscal conservatives don’t like equal justice.  They want preferential treatment—something they are accustomed to getting from politicians because of their hefty campaign contributions.

Conservatives need to educate themselves about the importance of a civil justice system that protects everyone and treats all litigants—rich and poor alike—as equals before the law.  Furthermore, true conservatives ought to resist attempts to federalize tort law and impose one-size-fits-all solutions to “problems” that are, in large part, the fictional creations of special interest lobbyists seeking to enrich the coffers of their wealthy clients.  Any change in medical malpractice laws should occur at the state level and be tailored to meet conditions in the individual states.  The people in Topeka may approach the same problem differently from the folks in Tallahassee.  They may be experiencing different problems, or perhaps, none at all.  In any event, the residents of Attapulgus, Georgia don’t want Chuck Schumer and Olympia Snow dictating the remedy they can pursue when a doctor leaves a pair of scissors in the site of their incision or causes avoidable brain damage to their newborn.

Tort reform subsidizes wrongdoing by shielding wrongdoers from accountability for the consequences of their misconduct.  It is an affirmative action program for corporate miscreants.  Incorporating tort reform into health care reform will do nothing to cut medical costs.  It is, however, guaranteed to result in more, not fewer, cases of medical malpractice. Furthermore, federalizing tort laws will only result in the accretion of more power in the hands of the central government and the emasculation of the rights of states and individuals.