The latest that I’ve seen is written by a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, named Kalman J. Kaplan. His profession is obviously invoked to add credibility to his statements — and he’s a Jew, and Jews are so smart, right? — but he’s still wrong, wrong, wrong.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall!
You can read the entirety of Kaplan’s article of 12 August 2018 on the American Thinker blog, but I don’t think that it’s really necessary to go there — unless you want to give thumbs up to my comment — since I include quotes from his crummy argument below:
I can very easily demolish most of these points.
“The Democrats [Lincoln] ran against were largely supporters of slavery….”
It seems that Kaplan is slightly misrepresenting D’Souza’s position in order to help him, because in all the times that I’ve heard D’Souza make this point in interviews and speeches, he has never said “largely.” Instead he asserts without a hint of nuance that the Democrats are THE PARTY OF SLAVERY. He talks as if there were only two parties, the unambiguously pro-slavery Democrats and the anti-slavery Republicans. The GOP sure enough was founded as an anti-slavery party, but the Democrats and the Whigs and the Federalists and the Know Nothings had no clear position on slavery. The Confederate vice-president, Alexander H. Stephens, was in fact a Whig (which was Lincoln’s party before the GOP formed), while Lincoln’s vice-president, Andrew Johnson, was a Democrat. D’Souza’s labeling of the Democrats as “the party of slavery” is an overgeneralization. It is not correct to say that the Democrats were THE PARTY OF SLAVERY when they had no clear position on it.
“The Klu Klux Klan was an organ of the Democratic Party….”
The KKK was never an organ of the Democratic Party. D’Souza alleges as his source for this claim the Marxist historian Eric Foner, an expert on Reconstruction. When you check Foner, however, you find out that he does not quite say that. Foner only says that the activities of the KKK during Reconstruction benefited the Democratic Party (in the South), the planter class, and White Supremacists. That’s as far as Foner goes. He does not allege any formal connection as D’Souza does — and a formal connection is crucial if the Democratic Party per se is to be made responsible for the Klan’s activities. D’Souza lies about that detail, because the charge of guilt-by-association with the Klan doesn’t hold up without it.
“The segregationist Dixiecrats were Democrats….”
To make his thesis work, D’Souza has to pretend that both major parties are pretty much the same as they were 150 years ago. The fact that Southern Segregationists generally switched to the GOP in the late 20th century blasts a giant hole in that thesis. Therefore D’Souza obfuscates.
Among the Dixiecrats, or Dixiecrat-supporters, were majorities of voters in several states of the Deep South that gave their electoral votes to the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1948, to the Republican Goldwater in 1964, to the American Independent candidate George Wallace in 1968, and to Nixon in 1972. That’s a lot of Dixiecrat voters who ended up voting Republican! Whenever this objection about Southern Segregationist support switching to the GOP comes up, D’Souza sidetracks the discussion into a trivia-quiz about Dixiecrat politicians. That’s really not relevant. The important and indisputable fact is that huge numbers of Southern White people who favored Segregation ended up voting for GOP presidential candidates. Kevin Phillips, who was an advisor to the Nixon campaign in 1968, wrote a book about this shift called The Emerging Republican Majority, which was written before the 1968 election and published after. My own mother voted for Strom in 1948 and Nixon in 1972; so, the effrontery of this immigrant trying to gaslight us about our own living memory is just remarkable.
“Robert Byrd, a former Dragon of the Klan …”
This is a gross exaggeration. Robert Byrd was never a Grand Dragon. Way back in the 1940s he was an Exalted Cyclops, which is a local office.
“Only one segregationist Democratic senator, Strom Thurmond, and one Democratic congressman actually switched parties.”
It was a lot more than that. I have already mentioned that MILLIONS of Southern Segregationist VOTERS began voting for Republican presidential candidates. I have found the following noteworthy politicians who switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party for apparently racial reasons: Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Thad Cochran, John Tower, Trent Lott, Charles Pickering, James F. Byrnes, Albert Watson, William Cramer, Arthur Ravenel Jr., Dave Treen, James D. Martin, Floyd Spence, Bo Callaway, Iris Faircloth Blitch, and Mills Godwin.
The reason why there were not more D-to-R Segregationist party-switchers is that the Democrats were the majority party until 1980 and switching parties generally means loss of seniority. But if you look into Segregationist politicians like Senator James Eastland, you find that they were known as conservatives and might just as well have been Republicans.
“Hitler … was a populist, who was hated by the Conservative Junkers of Prussia.”
But they clearly preferred him to the Communists. The conservative DNVP threw its support, including Alfred Hugenberg’s media-empire, behind Hitler in 1928 to make sure that the Communists would not come to power. That support was crucial for putting Hitler in power.
“Many of the Brown Shirts were homosexual.”
There was a clique of homosexuals around Ernst Roehm, who were extirpated. Homosexuality was illegal under Hitler’s rule.
Kalman J. Kaplan may be a professor of psychiatry, but an historian he is not.
You can do this too!