Jill Richardson: KKK's old rhetoric sounds like Trump's

From OtherWords.org

Rory McVeigh wrote The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, a study of the KKK in the 1920s, in 2009 —  long before Donald Trump became president. But it could almost be about Trump today.

In the 1920s, white, male, U.S.-born Protestants worried they were losing status, economic clout, and political power.

Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were settling in large numbers in industrial cities, where they took unskilled, low-paid manufacturing jobs in large plants. Simultaneously, many African-Americans were moving north for industrial jobs. More women were working, too.

Many of the anxious white Protestants were skilled laborers or small business owners. Large companies, chain stores, and the Sears catalog were out-competing them throughout the country.

Feeling squeezed out by the changing economy, the KKK framed American jobs as the rightful property of what they called “100 percent Americans.” They wrapped themselves in the flag, claimed immigrants were stealing jobs, and attempted to deny African Americans any further mobility.

You’ve heard that “stealing our jobs” line before.

It was true that the structural changes from industrialization hurt many small businesses and skilled laborers in the 1920s, just as neoliberal globalization hurt many workers and their communities more recently.

Yet instead of confronting this economic system, hardline nativists then and now sought to preserve the livelihoods of white people by depriving everyone else — playing on the fears of white Americans to gain their support.

Here’s a sample comparison of 1920s KKK and Donald Trump quotes.

KKK: “Klansmen believe that the time is at least near when American citizenship must be protected by restricting franchise to men and women who are able through birth and education to understand Americanism.”

Donald Trump: “We’re looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship, where you have a baby on our land, you walk over the border, have a baby — congratulations, the baby is now a U.S. citizen. … It’s frankly ridiculous.”

KKK: “Fifty thousand Mexicans have sneaked into the United States during the past few months and taken the jobs of Americans… All of the Mexicans are low type peons.”

Donald Trump: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

KKK: “The negro was brought to America. He came as a slave. We are in honor and duty bound to promote his health and happiness. But he cannot be assimilated… Rushing into cities, he is retrograding rather than advancing.”

Donald Trump: “Nobody has done more for black people than I have.” But also: “The Suburban Housewives of America” should “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”

McVeigh wrote, “Black men who dared to associate with white women, or who dared to challenge racial inequality in any of its dimensions, were immune from the Klan’s paternalistic protection.”

Donald Trump wrote, “Bring back the death penalty” for the Central Park 5, a group of five Black men falsely accused and imprisoned for assaulting a white jogger.

And, of course, when Black people protested police brutality, Trump threatened them with “vicious dogs” and tweeted: “LAW & ORDER!”

One hundred years apart, they are saying the same things. When I quizzed a friend on who said what, she said she could only tell them apart because the Klan’s grammar was better than Trump’s.

Job losses and other economic pains must be addressed, but we can fix these problems in a way that’s inclusive, not violent and divisive. Instead, white nationalists from the Klan to Trump glorify a past in which white men had more power than everyone else, casting themselves as protectors of white America against inferior “others.”

Jill Richardson is a sociologist.

Ignorance the bigger problem

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Very, very few Americans are sympathetic to the “Alt Right,’’ the KKK or neo-Nazis. Thus the huge “counter-demonstration’’ against the  Aug. 19 “Free Speech Rally’’ in Boston  was ridiculously overwrought.

The “Free Speech Rally’’ was conducted, such as it was, by an outfit called the Boston Free Speech Coalition, which says it’s “a coalition of libertarians, progressives, conservatives, and independents.”  The counter-demonstrators tried to label the coalition as a bunch of extreme right wingers and effectively quashed their freedom of speech. I have no idea what the real views of the members of the coalition might be. But I do know that their First Amendment rights were thwarted by this trendy counter-demonstration against “hate,’’ as if you could ban something that everyone feels from time to time.

The biggest problem in all this is not bigotry but massive ignorance about American constitutional rights and American civics and history in general. (Certainly if the Alt Right or outright fascists took over they’d curb or prohibit free speech themselves and knock a lot of heads in the process.)

Peter Certo: The KKK is but part of America's new ruling racist coalition

Movie poster in 1915. The movie is often cited for reviving the Ku Klux Klan.

An election that might have marked the ascension of America’s first woman president has instead proven historic for an altogether different reason. Namely, that Americans voted for the unabashedly anti-democratic alternative offered by her rival.

And they did it despite his almost cartoonish shortcomings.

Trump didn’t just offend pious liberals with his hard line on immigration, disdain for democratic norms, and disinterest in policy. He transgressed standards of decency across all political persuasions.

He bragged about sexually assaulting women. He disparaged injured war veterans. He was endorsed by the KKK. And now he’s America’s voice on the world stage.

How could that happen? Here’s one theory you might’ve heard:

After years of seeing their jobs outsourced, their incomes slashed, and their suffering ignored, the white working class threw in their lot with the candidate who cast aside political niceties and vowed to make their communities great again.

It’s a nice story — I even used to buy a version of it myself. But while Trump surely did clean up with white voters, the evidence simply doesn’t support the idea that they were as hard-up as the story goes.

For instance, pollster Nate Silver found during the GOP primary that Trump supporters pulled in a median income of $72,000 a year — some $10,000 more than the national median for white households. And while many did come from areas with lower social mobility, they were less likely to live in the stricken manufacturing communities Trump liked to use as backdrops for his rallies.

So if it wasn’t the economy, was it Hillary?

Clinton was clearly unpopular, in many cases for defensible reasons. She was cozy with Wall Street. She backed poorly chosen wars. Apparently people didn’t like the way she e-mailed.

But when you consider that we chose to give the nuclear codes to a man whose own aides refused to trust with a Twitter account over a former secretary of state, it hardly seems like Trump voters were soberly comparing the two candidates.

Instead, Vox writers Zack Beauchamp and Dylan Matthews poured through scores of studies and found a much more robust explanation — and it isn’t pretty.

It’s what pollsters gently call “racial resentment.”

That is, Trump’s core supporters were far more likely than other Republicans to hold negative views of African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims. They overwhelmingly favored the mass deportation of immigrants. And they were the most likely Republicans to agree that it would be “bad for the country” if whites comprised a smaller share of the population.

What’s more, another study found, racially resentful voters flocked to the GOP candidate regardless of their views about the economy. Their views on race drew them to Trump, not their job prospects.

Scores of other data back this up. Despite years of job growth and the biggest one-year bump in middle-class incomes in modern history, another researcher found, Republicans’ views of both African Americans and Latinos nosedived during the Obama years.

Not even a slowdown in immigration itself staunched the venom. Net migration between the U.S. and Mexico fell to 0 during the Obama years, yet Trump still launched his campaign with an infamous tirade against Mexican “rapists” and “murderers.”

None of that is to accuse all Trump voters of racism. But even if the bulk of them were just Republicans following their nominee, the social science strongly suggests that one of our major parties has been captured by whites so anxious about the changing face of America that they were willing to vote alongside the Klan.

That fringe has turned mainstream. The Trump years to come may herald any number of horrors, but the scariest part may be what we’ve learned about ourselves.

Peter Certo is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies and the editor of OtherWords.org.  Distributed by OtherWords.org.