In this Slate articlere the history of Robert Byrd’s association with the KKK, the author claims the KKK is “semi-libertarian” based on their current political party platform statement. In looking at it linked below is that an accurate characterization?
It’s a throwaway word in a hastily written Slate article. I wouldn’t read too much into it.
No. It’s loaded with protectionist measures. I’d call it populist.
Well, I guess it’s libertarian so long as you’re white.
That platform is also overtly theocratic. The only really libertarian aspects are on gun rights, and maybe on their desire to abolish child protective services.
The KKK and other American White Nationalists are, for the most part, essentially an extreme fringe of American paleoconservatism – populist, nativist, isolationist, traditionalist, hostile to both the poor and the elites, including Washington elites and Wall Street elites. The political tendency’s more mainstream expressions are Pat Buchanan and his America First Party and The American Conservative magazine.
Libertarians are something else again. (See this Pit thread.)
Not that they can’t find some common ground; Ron & Rand Paul seem to have appeal to both groups. And to White Nationalists too, I shouldn’t wonder.
And Christian. But it’s still more populist than libertarian.
That’s a horribly researched article.
There’s no longer such a thing as the Ku Klux Klan. There are about fifty different groups which call themselves the Ku Klux Klan, though they all implicitly admit that they aren’t the Klan by making their names more specific (Knights of the KKK, Imperial Klans of America, Knights of the White Camelia, Empire Knights, Bayou Knights, Church of the American Knights, etc.).
While the beliefs of white supremacist groups generally vary widely, Klan groups tend to exhibit less variation- though most will throw out whatever seems palatable at the time, or whatever suits their interests.
So, you end up with one Klan group making public appearances in shirts and ties, and watching their language, while another will make public appearances in hoods and robes, and yelling nigger and so on.
Economics simply doesn’t come up for the most part, except as a recruiting tool (ie., “Obama is giving your money to nonwhites!”) and when it does, the results are pretty much what you’d expect from a bunch of poorly educated hillbillies - classic populism, mixed with hints of traditional right-wing demagoguery (pro-welfare, but anti-big government, for example).
No, **anti-**welfare – welfare is money the goverment gives to lazy, unemployable n-words to subsidize their breeding and bribe them not to commit crimes. (Social Security does not count as welfare.) But pro-trade-protectionism, and probably pro-farm-subsidies if ever that comes up – any public expenditure or economic policy that is seen to benefit the white working class or lower middle class is fine and necessary.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is a good source on that.
See here for a listing of all the categories of “hate groups” the SPLC so defines and monitors (including black separatists and “radical traditionalist” Catholics).
Throwing in an association to libertarians is just a lame attempt to smear libertarians. Saying the Klan is ‘semi-libertarian’ because a couple of one group’s platform ideas are similar to those of libertarians is like saying the Nazis are ‘semi-Democrat’ because they believed in universal health care and free public education, or that Jeffrey Dahmer was ‘part Clinton’ because they both liked eating meat.
That’s the assumed position, but it’s not actually true. Klan groups typically include high numbers of unemployed individuals - after all, who else has time for that stuff?
I don’t think so, although that is arguably one of the effects. I think it’s more of a throwaway line than anything; Slate is not particularly anti-libertarian.
Which some do say, including Tea Partiers, paleoconservatives, and, I have no doubt, some Libertarians.
I’m not even a libertarian and I don’t support any of that stuff as a role of government at all (well, infrastructure as roads and bridges, maybe, but not at the federal level for the most part).
I think the Slate article is nonsense.
I don’t know that Senator Byrd was a “grand” whatever. He did rewrite legislation, after the vote, and he did use legalese that made the legislation read like the opposite of what it actually did. I do not say: Farewell, brother. I say, good riddance.
As for the “platform”? It is rhetoric.
I have met a few “klansmen”. One in Eureka, CA with a letter K tattooed on a segment of each of three fingers, so when he made a fist the letters were what you saw first. Another klansman I met was, he said, wanted for questioning in Everette, WA in connection with a murder. He had too many details about the murder not to have been the one to remove the man’s safety harness on high iron. I told the Deputy Sheriff, very likely another klansman.
This particular man, the wanted-for-questioning-in-connection-with-a-murder, kept trying to recruit me because my family had been high up in a masonic order. My maternal grandfather had been Head of Grand Commandery No. 1, Knights Templar, Detroit, MI. My paternal grand-uncle had been Head of Grand Commandery, Portland, OR. My dad was a Scottish Rite Mason. My mom was a co-founder of the Rainbow girls in her community. My dad’s family are civil engineers and educators, and so, I figure they came by their membership honestly. This klansman however was intrigued by my maternal grandfather, saying he worked for John D. Rockefeller. He kept insisting my maternal grandfather had been head of a group of assassins for Rockefeller, who had independent oilmen killed. I do not know anything about my maternal grandfather, other than he did first-class leather work. He was listed as a harnessmaker on my mother’s birth certificate and he worked for the railroad in Helena, MT. Then he went to Detroit, MI because he did the fancy leatherwork for private railroad cars and then for the most expensive road cars. I heard, from mom, he had been Head of Sales, Standard Oil Midwest. My understanding was it was at the end of his employment, only to give him a better retirement.
But this klansman also provided too many details of a murder of a local businessman, he has heard second-hand. The man living in the same town, who did participate provided more details yet.
I think they were very presumptuous to think I would approve.
I wrote a state official an email about it. Both men had bragged the nearby District Attorney will do nothing to their organization, as long as they murder anyone he directs.
I happen to believe it because that businessman told me enough about the problem he had with that District Attorney for me to believe that District Attorney would have him murdered.
I am thoroughly discredited, so you don’t have to believe any of it: I don’t care.
I put this information here, because it is “the straight dope” and this is who and what the KKK is really. I saw the printed literature, the patch, and I described it in every detail to the local FBI officer.
My understanding is there were three charters given out, at a time the masonic orders were not maintaining their numbers, and those three charters were revoked. I was told the Albert Pike masons had their charter revoked.
I never joined a group, but I did have three scholarships for college from Grand Commandery.
I am saying: If a “political group” happens to hold a political view or a political position as another group, that does not make them “libertarian” or “populist” or any political identification, when what they are is murdering racist bigots and criminally-minded and self-serving Albert Pike “satanists”.
The “theocracy” is satanism. There are arguments among their factions as what is the proper name for their god, Baphomet or whatever. But when the man who showed me his KKK patch was distressed, he threw his hands up in the air and cried, "Daddy, Satan. Daddy, Satan! DADDY, SATAN!
Maybe they are existentialists?
“Semi-libertarian” doesn’t mean anything. What could it mean? It doesn’t mean 50% libertarian. If you look at the Klan’s policies some of them are in line with libertarian policies, but so what? You could say that about virtually any political program. (Maybe not North Korea’s.) Again, it’s just a throwaway word.
Is it possible that you could rewrite this in English, because I got halfway through and lost the thread of your story.
SIDESHOW BOB: Attempted murder? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry? Do they?
I know that when William J. Simmons re-founded the Klan in 1915, he consciously modeled it on the Freemasons (secret handshakes, hierarchy, grandiose titles). But I never heard there was any other connection between the two.
Well, there is: schizophrenia.