KKK crucial to building the South’s enduring Republican majority, study finds.
The Ku Klux Klan played an active and enduring role in steering southern white voters away from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, according to a new study.
The white supremacist group resurged to prominence in the 1960s as a reaction to the civil rights movement, and its violent extremism inflamed racial division and polarized communities for generations, according to the study published by the American Sociological Review.
“It encouraged white voters to prioritize the defense of white supremacy when making voting decisions, upending long-standing Democratic Party allegiances,” wrote the study’s authors.
The researchers — David Cunningham, professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at Brandeis University, Rory McVeigh of the University of Notre Dame and Justin Farrell of Yale University — studied county voting records in 10 southern states where the KKK actively recruited members in the 1960s.
There's more to the study but it underscores and makes concrete the stuff people like me think and have thought for....ever, really: Republicans and the Klan are birds of a feather.
We see so much unending racist crap out of Republicans and their ilk (baggers, libertarians, what-ever), now a study documenting this.