> > CB: It is factually inaccurate to say that U.S.
> elites have traditionally
> > kept a tight lid on any kind of right wing,
> intolerant, mass movements
An interesting discussion, but beside my point, which was that Americans won't normally support imperialist crusades in merely moral disguises. That is why the Iraq and Afghan wars had to be sold as revenge and self-defense. Bush could not have got support for those wars by starting with the ides of saving Afghab women or bringing democracy to Iraq. That sort of rationalization is all post hoc. For better or worse, Americans don'r much care about the evils done by foreigners to foreigners. Maybe tolerance is the wrong word for that. It was misleading, anyway.
> > >
>
> Yet it was the federal government that dispatched
> troops to curb the
> excesses of KKK-rightwing populism. It can be also
> argued that the Civil
> War was a federal effort to curb the excesses of
> racist populism.
>
No, Woj, the Civil War cannot be so seen, for lots of reasons. The Confederacy and antebellum Sourtherns ociety was not populist, it was pseudo-aristocratic. The North and its war effort was every bit as racist as the South. The objection to slavery was not basic federal policy in preserving the Union, and objecting to slavery, as Lincoln did, was entirely compatible with racist assumptions, which Lincoln shared. So that's a hash.
Now, after the Civil War, in Reconstruction, the federal government made efforts to curb real racist populist movement in the South, passed the Anti-KKK Act (now section 1983, still the basis of lawsuits against state racism), the 13- 14th, and 15th amendments, occupied the South, etc. This petered out by 1877. From the mid 1870s through 1954, the federal government turned a blind eye to or actively sanctioned Southern populist or populist-backed white supremacy -- lynch law, Jim Crow, the works. This changed after Brown v. Bd of Education abd the Civil Rights movement, but the era of active federal intervention against racist populism in the South was over by 1980 or soon thereafter.
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