The modern day Republican Party’s policies align with the KKK on many issues. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is a far right organization that advocates white supremacy, white nationalism, subordination of women, and anti-immigration, and anti-union. Their main goal was, is, and always has been racial subordination. Since their founding, they have fought against voting rights of black people and the right to keep and bear arms for black people. They are now using issues of illegal immigration, urban crime, civil unions and same-sex marriage to recruit new members.
Republicans don’t like being called out on their Jim Crow voting laws or their Stand Your Ground gun laws that frequently do not get interpreted the same for black people or women as they do for the whitest man in the room. (Look at the Trayvon Martin case as an example, where the white jury did not understand that Trayvon had a right to stand his ground – or that Zimmerman was the perpetrator of the altercation that resulted in his murdering Trayvon.) And since they know it is “bad” to be a racist, they will deny their true beliefs while hiding under the deflection that Democrats were racist way back in the late 1860s when the KKK was founded by six veterans of the Confederate Army. This is the “they did it first” routine that children use. It is true that Democrats founded the original KKK over 150 years ago, but the Democratic Party switched sides in 1948 with the addition of a civil rights campaign plank. It was the Democrat Party fighting for Civil Rights in the 1960s that lost the Southern white voters to the Republican Party. So, the Republican Party is now the party of the KKK – not the Democrats.
Why did the racists switch to the GOP? Many reasons, but we can attribute a lot of that shift to Nixon’s Southern Strategy and the current attempts to disguise the racism inherent in the strategy. Lee Atwater, the architect of the Southern Strategy, explained in an infamous interview that took place as he was serving under Reagan:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*****, n*****, n*****.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*****’ – that hurts you, backfires – so you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that…. You’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
The Republican’s Tea Party base gobbles up this type of coded language – they know exactly what it means. Racists love the Republican policies that hurt and subordinate minorities and women. It makes them furious to think of the non-white population taking good paying jobs and daring to vote. It makes them furious that women are no longer staying home, barefoot and pregnant. They are denying their racism – and sexism – and accusing the Democrats of it. But they are speaking to their shrinking base; no one else listens to them or believes what they say.
Many voters now see the GOP as obstructing Obama because he is black. Republicans can deny this all they want, but the numbers don’t lie. Even as they scream at the top of their lungs that they are not racist, their strategy is beginning to backfire on them. There are many former Republicans and real independents who did not vote Republican in the last few elections because they could not morally do so, due to the rampant racism. What matters to voters is where each party stands TODAY, not 150 years ago. The racist people left the Democratic Party over the issue of Civil Rights and joined today’s White Hood party; aka the Republican Party.
Because the KKK still exists and aligns with the Republican Party issues-wise, attracting the racists in this country, you cannot spell KKK without the letters G-O-P.
This is a summary of: Educating Republicans – Why You Can’t Spell KKK Without the Letters G-O-P, Aug. 15th, 2013http://www.politicususa.com/2013/08/15/klan-members-democrats-desperate-deflections-racist-party.html