That's Why Some Call It a Second Reconstruction

It was 155 years ago today — October 17, 1871 — that President Ulysses S. Grant declared martial law in South Carolina.

What?!

That's what I learned today from the Equal Justice Institute's calendar. 

The feds had investigated the Ku Klux Klan's violence in the state. In keeping with the Ku Klux Klan Act, which Congress had passed and Grant signed earlier in 1871, nine counties in South Carolina were warned that they were depriving citizens of their civil rights through terrorism, and that martial law would be declared if the Klan did not stop its actions. 

They didn't stop, so Grant followed through: 

Many affluent Klan members fled the jurisdiction to avoid arrest, but by December 1871 approximately 600 Klansmen were in jail. More than 200 arrestees were indicted, 53 pleaded guilty, and five were convicted at trial. Klan terrorism in South Carolina decreased significantly after the arrests and trials...

But as anyone familiar with U.S. history knows, Reconstruction did not last, and racial violence against Black people increased across the South over the next decades.

I think there needs to be a willingness to approach the Right in the U.S. today from that perspective if anything is ever going to change for the better in this country. 

Here are two essays I saw recently that touch on the core underlying what we now think of as Trumpism, but is really the Right's fight against a pluralistic democracy, going back to the same beliefs that led to the Civil War:

Demonizing Democracy by Thomas Zimmer, Georgetown University historian. Subtitle: The Right has long derided any attempt at leveling racial and social hierarchies as anti-American “socialism” or “communism.” What they are actually fighting is equality. 

Polarization Is Not the Problem by Lilliana Mason, Johns Hopkins University political scientist. Abstract: Partisan polarization is not the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, but a symptom of a deeper struggle over who belongs and deserves equal rights. Rapid gains by racial minorities, women, and LGBTQ citizens have produced an ethnonationalist backlash whose adherents now wield disproportionate power through the Republican Party. This conflict has intensified partisan animosity and moral disengagement, but a “both sides” diagnosis obscures the asymmetry between a faction seeking to reverse social progress and those resisting it. Polarization is therefore less the disease than democracy’s immune response to an unpopular, antidemocratic movement.* 

As Minnesota approaches an election where it's likely to elect a new governor famous for promoting herself for being great at "reaching across the aisle," I remember these words of Son of Baldwin, Robert Jones Jr.:

We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

We don't need civility with people who want to control our lives, or who want us to die or disappear.

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* Here's a quote from Mason's essay that I find oddly hopeful: 

The current ethnonationalist movement in the United States can only succeed with an extraordinary amount of violence; there is no other way to re-oppress the 70 percent of the population that is not white and male. This revanchist project is already being met with resistance.