“The debate over the Ku-Klux never effectively silenced those who argued that the Klan did not exist at all,” Parsons writes. “Despite massive and productive public and private efforts to gather, circulate, and evaluate information about the Ku-Klux Klan and despite the federal government’s devoting attention and resources to the Klan as though it were a real threat, the national debate over the Ku-Klux failed to move beyond the simple question of whether the Ku-Klux existed.”
It worked because of the half-truths people are willing to swallow in order to survive with their self-perceptions intact. Reconstruction-era Republicans used the persistence of racist violence in the South as a political weapon against their Democratic opponents. Klan denial helped Democrats rationalize reports of that violence away as a partisan conspiracy to strip them of their rights. They made themselves the true victims of the narrative, preserving their conception of their own benevolence and of the evil of their political opponents. “Part of the allure of misrepresentations,” Parsons notes, “is that they can help individuals or societies gloss over their own inconsistencies and develop more robust and appealing self-understandings.” When Republican Representative Andrew Clyde went from barricading doors in the Capitol against the January 6 mob to calling the attack a “normal tourist visit,” it wasn’t because he was having difficulty navigating a complex media environment.
Adam Serwer discussing Elaine Frantz Parsons's Ku Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction
Serwer's larger point is that whatever the fog that enshrouds and distorts partisan contested issues when we're in the middle of contesting them, the truth eventually is established for any fair-minded person who cares to know it. I find that the only argument that I can make with those on the Right who today insist that their grievance ideology is justified is simply to say, "Come back in twenty years, and we'll see who proves right." That would have been the best argument twenty years ago this month in disagreements I had with those supporting the imminent invasion of Iraq.
Delusional thinking now will play out the way it always plays out because the more things change the more one can count on fools making a mess of things. But sooner or later reality reasserts itself.