What I’m Reading: The Anatomy of Fascism – 27 in a series – “The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state…”

“It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan. Just after the Civil War, some former Confederate officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans in 1867 by the Radical Reconstructionists, set up a militia to restore an overturned social order. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in the eyes of the Klan’s founders, no longer defended their community’s legitimate interests.”

From The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton

Anatomy fascism

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