Nimitha’s Reviews > The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition > Status Update

The Klannish spirit—fearful, angry, gullible to sensationalist falsehoods, in thrall to demagogic leaders and abusive language, hostile to science and intellectuals, committed to the dream that everyone can be a success in business if they only try—lives on.

Every such movement (right-wing populists) arises also from specific local and national contexts, and all are different. But they share characteristics, as a particular but recognizable type of conservatism.

When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

The journalist Dorothy Thompson, who spent years covering Nazi Germany,& lived through the 1920s heyday of the Klan, pointed out that “no people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. . . .

Like most other right-wing populisms, the Klan could not survive a peace treaty or even an armistice with its enemies. It needed a sense of danger to thrive. Klanspeople had to visualize themselves as soldiers defending against threats, and in doing so created belief in those threats. Right-wing populisms often produce this doubled effect.

"To be manly was to fight; not to fight was to be weak. All this was fundamental to fascism, and the Nazis used it in violent, even sadistic attacks on and humiliations of its “aliens.” The northern Ku Klux Klan rarely did that. Klan leaders realized that they could gain more from electoral than from martial action."
RSS seems to be modelled more after KKK than other fascist parties.

Fascism is distinguished not only by its ideologies, which are often incoherent, but also through its visual symbolism and its aggressive mobilizations. The Klan similarly organized performances of masculinity and male bonding through uniforms, parades, rituals, secrecy, and hierarchical military ranks and titles.

In this respect the KKK was authoritarian, even as it denounced Catholics for their subservience to papal authority. Klan anti-intellectualism protected it from skeptics. In this respect it differed from European fascisms, which, partly because they were less religiously narrow, did not typically display hostility to science.

The emphasis on faith as opposed to evidence-driven inquiry both reflected and fed suspicion of science, especially evolutionary theory. That suspicion strengthened its hostility to intellectuals in general. Klan doctrine was impregnable to disproof. Its discursive mode—anecdotal, testimonial—resisted challenge.

Condemning Jews and Catholics while honoring “right” Americans for the same practices speaks to the Klan’s demand that supporters accept its allegations on faith. Because the Klan was a religious as well as a nationalist organization, the beliefs required of its members were all the more obligatory. Challenging its truths constituted treason or heresy or both.