Quotes from Kevin M. Kruse

The UDC's monument campaigns were always supported by a narrative that Confederate veterans fought nobly and that defeat did not erase the justness of their cause.

As ideas of American identity continue to evolve, so America First must continually produce new enemies against which to define its own supposed pure vision of America.

Indeed, as if channeling Paul Weyrich's mantra, a Texas Republican explained that while there might not be widespread voter fraud, "'an article of religious faith' among Republicans… was that an ID law 'could cause enough of a drop-off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote.'"51

However, researchers have also found that whites who hold implicit biases are convinced that their advocacy for voter IDs is not based on racism but rather on ensuring election integrity.

Thus, the language of election integrity created an acceptable post–civil rights race-neutral cover to allow the myth of massive, rampant voter fraud to continue to do damage. There was Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was based on his 2016 claims that he would have won the popular vote if three to five million illegal votes had not been cast. That commission collapsed with nothing but blank pages in the section on voter fraud.

The pastor at Pittsburgh's Trinity Lutheran Church agreed, calling the sermon competition "a concentrated and remarkable contribution to the cause of freedom.

The choice," he insisted, "boils down to this: 'Christ or Communism.' There is really no other. Those in between—playing neutral—are literally playing into the hands of the enemy."24

But then, in 2016, Trump announced his own presidential candidacy on a platform of America First, and he stopped repudiating the really staunch Right wacko vote. David Duke quickly endorsed Trump, saying he was "overjoyed to see Donald Trump and most Americans embrace most of the issues that I've championed for years. My slogan remains America first.

Oklahoma lingered so long as a territory because of who lived there. The familiar image of territories as "empty" lands awaiting enough inhabitants to sustain a government is badly misleading. The reason Congress held territories back from statehood wasn't that no one lived in them but because the wrong people did.

In all, the United States today has five inhabited territories that contain more than 3.6 million people. Those people cannot vote for president, have no voting representatives in Congress, lack full constitutional protection, and suffer the predictable effects. All five territories are poorer, per capita, than the poorest US state.

During the reign of President Donald Trump, who pandered to white nationalists and promised to protect monuments to the Confederacy, the GOP reverted to its earlier form with a vengeance. Due to the success of the Southern Strategy, Republicans are now unrecognizable as the party of Lincoln.

Paul Weyrich, who was a cofounder of the Heritage Foundation, gave a talk in 1980 where he laid out what would become the blueprint for GOP victory. He chastised the audience for believing in "Good Government" where they wanted "everybody to vote." "Well, I don't," he said, because "our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.

monuments continued to be the most tangible reminders of the Lost Cause myth and the white South's continued loyalty to the principles of states' rights, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries meant the right to maintain a system of segregation based on white supremacy.

Xenophobia and racism merged with "America first" nativism in James Murphy Ward's 1917 book, The Immigration Problem, or America First. It was also expressed in President Theodore Roosevelt's 1916 call for a "nationalized and unified America" as well as in the Ku Klux Klan's defense of an "America for Americans."11

The new ethnic politics is a direct challenge to the WASP conception of America," the Slovak American intellectual Michael Novak noted in his 1972 book, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics.

With a wide-angle lens, this book traces the political, economic, racial, and sexual divisions in modern America, but also the cultural and technological changes that confronted and contorted the country along the way. Following these fault lines, in both senses of the term, we examine the history of our divided America.

This bright line soon blurred. Republicans, who sent nearly two dozen African Americans to Congress in the late nineteenth century, relaxed their commitment to racial equality as the twentieth century began. Southern Democrats still led the way in entrenching disfranchisement and discrimination, but northern Republicans now offered tacit acceptance or explicit approval.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, Republicans and Democrats each had made peace with white supremacy. Notably, when the Klan revived in the 1920s, the second version found supporters in both parties: Democrats in the South, Republicans in the Midwest.

Nevertheless, some believed a Republican revival could be forged through concerted appeals to the disaffected Dixiecrats. J. Harvie Williams, a North Carolinian, spent 1949 fund-raising for a "Citizens' Political Committee" that would spark "political realignment" by strengthening the coalition of conservatives. A more "formal alliance between Republicans and Southern Democrats," he noted, would inspire "white,

history that seeks to exalt a nation's strengths without examining its shortcomings, that values feeling good over thinking hard, that embraces simplistic celebration over complex understanding, isn't history; it's propaganda.

As Sarah Maza has echoed in her own work, "Trying to fit a scenario from the past onto one in the present can be disastrous: 'We will liberate Iraq, as we did Europe!' 'Don't go for a diplomatic solution—remember Munich!'"19

He urged his audience to get religion not simply for their own salvation but for the salvation of their city and country. Without "an old-fashioned revival," he warned, "we cannot last!" A

Of course, we are a little proud and very happy for whatever good we have been able to do in waking people up to the peril of collectivism and the importance of Freedom under God." But the battle was far from won. "I do not consider that we can relax our efforts in any way or at any point," Fifield noted. "It is still a long road back to what was and, please God, will again be America.

The ad urged readers to make their own declaration of independence in 1951. "Declare that government is responsible TO you—rather than FOR you," it continued. "Declare that freedom is more important to you than 'security' or 'survival.' Declare that the rights God gave you may not be taken away by any government on any pretense.