President Donald Trump is imposing a right-wing political ideology and practice that increasingly resembles what Christ Hedges has dubbed “Christian fascism".

Hedges’ book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, was published in 2007. In it, he warned that the incipient right-wing movement resembled the early fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Trump posted the following rant on his Truth Social website:

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in the country today.

Trump and Kirk endorsed the “ great replacement” theory, the right-wing idea that nonwhite immigrants will soon displace white Americans. In March 2024, Kirk stated: “The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.”

Now, nearly two decades after Hedges published American Fascists, the Christian right is moving toward becoming an explicitly fascist movement. It is driven by white Christian nationalism and  neo-Nazis – and the long-dormant Klan or KKK (formally the Ku Klux Klan) may be finding renewed life.

As the Southern Poverty Law Centre reports, “The United Klan Nation notably co-hosted events with the Aryan Freedom Network, while antisemitic Christian Identity and Klan-affiliated networks, including the Church of the Keystone Knights and Kingdom Identity Ministries, overlapped through shared leadership.” It adds:

The Maryland White Knights appear to have formed from the remnants of the Old Glory Knights, while the Sacred White Knights seem to have risen from the dissolution of the Loyal White Knights. Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Knights have resurfaced, and the Silent Knights are actively recruiting. Another key connection has been between the United Klan Nation and the Aryan Freedom Network, evident through shared events and mutual promotion.

We are living through the third incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. Today’s Klan is but a sad ghost of yesteryear’s fearful organisations. Up until the Kirk assassination, this iteration was neither as vicious nor as vindictive as the two previous movements, more a rag-tag assortment of the alt-right that rallied in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017 and appeared at other political hotspots.

The two earlier movements were relatively short-lived but raised much hell. The first generation arose between 1866 to 1879 in the wake of the South’s defeat in the Civil War and efforts to implement Reconstruction. The second version emerged in the pre-World War I era from 1915 to 1927 and flourished during the tumultuous Roaring ‘20s. Each Klan generation appealed to native-born, Protestant white Americans and did so in different ways, but each inflicted much pain and suffering.

Linda Gordon, an NYU history professor, thoughtfully examines what she calls the Klan’s “second coming,” in her 2017 book,  _The Second Coming_ of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and American Political Tradition. Her book is invaluable for readers a century later because it deconstructs the old adage, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The past is a roadmap to the present.

Gordon argues that the Klan represents how some of the most primitive political passions are rooted in fear and hatred of otherness – and a willingness to exploit these sentiments for purpose, power and profit.

Hatred of another group is as old as humanity and is an intimate feature of America’s “soul”, the nation’s socio-personal, political values/beliefs. It signifies the great fear of difference that helped shape the country’s history, especially over the last 150 years. It was bitterly expressed in the two preceding Klan incarnations. Those targeted by this rage were seen as “different”, a threat – and, accordingly, assailed in words and wars.

The original Klan movement was a limited, select and secret organisation, with elaborate rituals and costumes. Its principal purpose was to terrorise the recently freed Southern African American population with attacks by hooded, cross-burning night riders and many lynchings.

Gordon pinpoints two events that triggered the rise of the “second” wave of the Klan – on 3 March 1915, when D. W. Griffin’s movie, Birth of a Nation, premiered in Times Square. It was furthered on 17 August 1915, when Leo Frank, a Jewish Atlanta factory manager, was lynched for the alleged murder of a 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan. Together, they ignited the fires of American primitivism.

The second movement drew a larger bull’s-eye of those who threatened the true American way – it included African Americans and Jews, non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants (e.g., Irish, Italians, Mexicans), non-Protestant Christians (e.g., Catholics, Mormons) as well as those promoting “loose” morals, whether involving alcoholic drinks, prostitution, gambling or popular entertainment (e.g., live shows, movies, records and books judged obscene).

More importantly, it employed the services of “modern” public-relations professionals who exploited smart advertising, press releases, trained recruiters, free membership for ministers, the collection of dues and the sale of its regalia to build a powerful — and profitable! — national organisation.

At its height in the mid-1920s, it claimed between two and five million members and elected hundreds of its members to public office, including governors and Congressmen. It played a critical role in securing the passage of eugenics laws in 30 states and the passage of mean-spirited, anti-immigration laws, and also supported the adoption of the 18th Amendment (i.e., establishing Prohibition) and the 19th Amendment (i.e., giving white women the vote).

Gordon identifies a half-dozen factors that helped fuel the Klan’s second coming: deep-seated nativism, especially opposition to immigration; deep adherence to conservative evangelical Christian beliefs; alignment with conservative “fraternal” organisations (e.g., the Masons); strong advocacy of abstinence and suspicion of city dwellers with alleged “loose morals”, especially recent immigrants and those supposedly better educated, secular and liberal; and a fervent reactionary “populism” grounded in hatred of those who were supposedly different.

“Never an aberration, the KKK may actually have enunciated values with which a majority of 1920s Americans agreed,” Gordon warns. She adds, “But the Klannish spin whirled these ideas into greater intensity.”

As the organisation grew, its leadership was handsomely rewarded. This fuelled rivalries and led to revelations about improper practices involving local, state and national male leaders. Many were accused of immoral conduct, including drinking alcohol, visiting prostitutes and committing adultery, as well as corruption, including theft of Klan monies; one state leader was convicted of murder, after kidnapping and raping his secretary. Scandals helped kill the Klan’s second coming.

One of the book’s most revealing discussions involves the role of women in the 1920s Klan. There were at least half a million women in the organisation (some claim three million) and they formed their own parallel organisation, the Women of the KKK. These were early conservative “feminists” who accepted the traditional gender order and promoted women’s rights within it.

Gordon paints revealing portraits of three important Klan feminists. Elizabeth Tyler, the PR professional who helped reposition the organisation and is described as a “driven, bold, corrupt, and precociously entrepreneurial woman”; Daisy Barr, a Quaker who served as a leading spokesperson and chief recruiter who enriched herself through profitable schemes; and Alma White, who headed the Pillar of Fire religious order that included 52 churches, two colleges, seven divinity schools, two radio networks and ten magazines and newsletters, and who claimed the Klan had divine authority. Gordon notes that they were “experienced at organising large events, state-of-the-art in managing money [and] unafraid to attract publicity". She identifies them as “thoroughly modern women".

In a concluding coda, Gordon argues her strongest case with regard to the all-important distinction between the Klan and the then-growing movement of fascism in Europe. The Klan was “part of a group of movements around the globe that have come to be called right-wing populism". But, she argues, “luckily the 1920s Klan appeared in a country with long-embedded electoral procedures". She points out that the Klan didn’t enlist the super-rich, corporate capital (e.g., Henry Ford, a staunch antisemite), nor did it romanticise violence like followers of Mussolini and Hitler.

We can be grateful that today’s Klan is not yet that of its two earlier incarnations. Sadly, the underlying forces that drove the second coming — e.g., racism, fear of immigrants, evangelical Christianity and economic uncertainty — remain defining issues of 21st-century America’s social and political life. As much as things have changed over the last century, they sometimes seem oh-so familiar or, as Yogi Berra once observed, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

Republished from CounterPunch, 8 October 2925

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.