The post-insurrection testimony of William Pitt Kellogg has been haunting me lately. He survived several coups as governor of LA during Reconstruction & gave a sobering assessment of their causes.

He testified that Reconstruction had been manageable until "the race-issue was there placed in the foreground" by white conservatives.

White conservatives abandoned all other policy issues & "appealed editorially to white men to employ white labor for political reasons."

Their goal in this was to radicalize white workers—to ensure that they had a vested financial interest in attacking & murdering leftist politicians friendly to racial equality.

In practice, it also meant firing Black workers so that they & their families would starve to death.

To summarize, you have a conservative "white man's party" that's overtly abt killing their political opponents to create more white jobs.

Ideology matters, folks. I've been publicly calling Republicans a fascist party bc their only consistent ideological position is white power. Their 180° reversals on debt & national security underscore the point & make them especially dangerous. No "compromise" will fix this.

I am deeply worried that white Dems, & white folks more broadly, don't understand this point—that our national religion of whiteness will lead white Americans to embrace a neo-redemptionist politics. Nothing could be more dangerous.

The original politics of "redemption" came after the Civil War when white Americans from #bothsides found common cause in white power—suppressing migrant, white women's, & especially Black rights. This "reunion" of Rebel & U.S. soldiers at Gettysburg is a classic of the genre.

The term itself—"redemption"—comes from the white paramilitary units who sought to "redeem" their states from "Negro rule" by murdering their political opponents, especially Black southerners.

Lots of quibbling on this point, but as a historian of this movement, I think it would be correct to call theirs a proto-fascist movement.