It was Lee Atwater who showed Republicans how to appeal to the racist vote without sounding racist. He was the refiner of the finally backfiring Republican Southern Strategy. Atwater taught Republicans how to hide the racism upon which the Southern Strategy was built.
That’s a heck of a lot of denial that Republicans are seen as the party of racism. This denial is accomplished via deflection to a historical reference that definitely makes Democrats of the 1860s look bad but has nothing to do with today’s GOP or Democratic Party. This deflection is going on being two centuries old. That’s pretty desperate.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is a far right organization, advocating white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration stances. Their end goal was, is and always has been racial subordination, and to this end they fought way back in their founding against voting rights of black people and the right to keep and bear arms for black people. In Southern cities they opposed unions. They
recruit in this century using issues of illegal immigration, urban crime, civil unions and same-sex marriage.
These positions align with the modern day Republican Party’s policies on many issues.
Yes, Democrats were a big part of the original KKK over 150 years ago. But Democrats were on the other side in 1948 with the addition of civil rights as a campaign plank and on into the fights for Civil Rights in the 60s, losing Southern white voters to the Republican Party. But really, what matters when you are voting is where each party stands TODAY. (The KKK had a resurgence in the 20s by white protestants angry at industrialization and immigration and high on Prohibition and the Bible, and a third big incarnation in reaction to the Civil Rights movement.)
