It seems you’ve got an axe to grind here — both to try and minimize democrat culpability for historical and present racism, and to somehow transfer it to the republicans. For example, you’ll cite KKK figures from Indiana in the 1920s, which of course represented a small fraction of the KKK at the time, and then assert that it was representative of a KKK defection away from democrats in the 1960s. The anachronism in your argument doesn’t help you.
What was left of KKK became republican after Democrat support for the civil rights act of 1964.
You mean the civil rights act that was pushed for by Republicans and fought against by Democrats? Although, as you can see below, it was primarily a regional difference — southern republicans hardly existed at that time, and northern democrats followed the lead of their republican counterparts.
The original House version:
- Southern Democrats: 7–87 (7–93%)
- Southern Republicans: 0–10 (0–100%)
- Northern Democrats: 145–9 (94–6%)
- Northern Republicans: 138–24 (85–15%)
The Senate version:
- Southern Democrats: 1–20 (5–95%) (only Ralph Yarborough of Texas voted in favor)
- Southern Republicans: 0–1 (0–100%) (John Tower of Texas)
- Northern Democrats: 45–1 (98–2%) (only Robert Byrd of West Virginia voted against)
- Northern Republicans: 27–5 (84–16%)
Seems funny that the KKK would “become republican” when the Republican party overwhelming voted for the Civil Rights act too, and had been pushing it for years against democrats :)
My point being that political parties can change until in some cases they become the opposite of what they once were
I’m not sure if that’s entirely true — they can certainly improve their PR, and find different ways to express themselves, and demonize their opponents with lies, but the core racism of the Democrat party lives on to this day in the maintenance of the “democrat plantation”, where blacks are kept poor and dependent on government, in high-violence conditions with broken families, while their votes are still “harvested”. Not to say that your average Democrat believes in racism in the same sense that they did in the 1960s, but even things like affirmative action are premised on the inferiority of certain races. Whitewashing the image of the democrat party hasn’t changed its disparate effect on blacks in America. Every major city with massive rates of black crime and poverty have been run by democrats for decades and decades.
On the opposite side of the fence, poor rural classes governed by Republicans have significantly lower crime rates, despite enduring poverty as deep, or deeper, than in the inner cities. One could guess that this difference comes from the lack of victim culture in poor rural areas, or the invidious thug culture in inner cities.
In any case, I think you’ve made my point for me — there are so few KKK members now, they’re no longer a significant force. In a population of 300 million, 5000 KKK members are a minority of a minority of a minority, and the attempt to tarnish the republican party with them would be like taking 5000 child rapists in the US who voted democrat and blaming the democrats for them. Neither group is representative of the party they might vote for, by any stretch of the imagination.
