WHITE REACTIONARY POPULISM HAS A LONG HISTORY

Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1994) ("This study aims to demonstrate the basic consistency of [Klansmen's] motives and positions. The source of their consistency was a world view and politics best characterized, in my view, as reactionary populism. In it, the anti-elitism characteristic of populism joined with eh commitment to enforce the subordination of a whole group pf people. The appeal of this politics was rooted deep within American society and culture: in the legions of middle-class white men who felt trapped between capital and labor and int eh political culture they inherited from their forebears. Fearful for the future, Klan leaders drew from the wellsprings of American politics to fashion an ideology that would enable them to hold on to their basic values, make sense of rapidly changing dial relations, and fend off challenges to their power, They drew from classical liberalism their ideas about economics, and from republicanism their notion of citizenship and the commonweal, in particular its long exclusion form the right to participate in political affairs of economic dependents--whether slaves, free women and children, or property-less men. The synthesis Klan leader fashioned extended and modified, but no means contradicted, values widely held in American society, It proved compelling enough to attract millions." "This book describes that synthesis and explains its appeal." Id. at xiii-xv. The more things change, the more reactionary attitudes remain the same! One needs to study the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s to fully understand the roots of white supremacy in twenty-first-century America, in Trump's America.).