No, Lord, the KKK is not a “liberal” organization

So a couple of talking heads got into a ruckus on CNN during the network’s Super Tuesday primary coverage. CNN executives have to love this, because they get all the excitement of a Jerry Springer show and still get to cling to a veneer of respectability.

This particular flare-up involved Van Jones, who briefly worked for the Obama White House, and Jeffrey Lord, who is perhaps most notable for having slept through the 1960s and the Republican Party’s entire Southern Strategy.

What is the Southern Strategy? To briefly recap, it’s a strategy the GOP, led by Richard Nixon, undertook in the mid- to late-’60s to capture white male voters in the South by playing to their racism. Nixon rode the strategy to two terms as president, and the strategy has worked so effectively since then that most of the South is solidly Republican to this day.

Corey Robin, in his book “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin,” notes a statement by GOP strategist Lee Atwater:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘n****r, n****r, n****r.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n****r’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, forced busing, states’ rights … and you’re getting so abstract. Now, 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. ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing … and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘n****r, n****r.’”

You don’t need to look much further than this statement to see a damning indictment of the Republican Party’s entire platform, from Nixon in the ‘60s and ‘70s, through GOP patron saint Ronald Reagan in the ‘80s, to George W. Bush in the 2000s.

But what’s most significant is how many people who up until the 1960s had been Southern Democrats, such as Mississippi Sen. Strom Thurmond, joined the Republican Party after the GOP adopted this strategy.

So when Lord says the KKK is “historically” a “liberal” organization, he’s hoping watchers are ignorant of the Southern Strategy — and given that he stumps for Donald Trump, he can rest assured a great many of that candidate’s voters almost certainly are. But he knows better, and so should anyone who witnessed his altercation with Van Jones.