Dude, who even knows.
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I saw someone quote for the sake of critique Mark Lilla’s line that
liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it
But it didn’t get at what bugs me so much about this. First, “still exists” is a stretch, there were three different KKKs that might have been inspired by the others but had no continuity; today’s Klansmen are in iffy connection even to the third founding
also the first KKK wasn’t nearly as important to suppressing freedmen and overturning Reconstruction as the broader, more public Red Shirts or White League, a lot of it was tilting upper-class (think of what it means in a feudal society to operate from horseback) they had media and intellectual connections to spread their legend
BUT ANYWAY, even if you set that aside for the sake of a snappy way to say “the first American identity politics were white identity politics”, it’s still glaringly factually incorrect, the nativist American (“Know-Nothing”) Party was founded 10 years before the First KKK
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