It’s a problem that the KKK in America fraudulently campaign on an underdog ticket.
According to historians Ed Ayers and Brian Balogh, Americans have long rooted for the underdog.
It’s truly problematic that the oppressors can somehow twist logic into appearing as if they’re victims.
Our country and the very fabric of our existence as the United States of America come from our ability to rise up and excel during improbable circumstances, dating all the way back to the Revolutionary War.
Being a horrible “loser” in fact motivates support.
The phenomenon has also been documented outside sports. In one 1980 study — conducted during the presidential election — participants disproportionately rooted for Ronald Reagan when told that Jimmy Carter had a lead in the polls, and rooted for Carter when told that Reagan did.
A lot of it links to the KKK fraudulently claiming it is somehow unfair that white men don’t get to rule the country judged only by their gender and race.
…when someone has been disadvantaged unfairly, being the underdog can actually make that person appear significantly more physically attractive.
So you can see the problem, hopefully, when The Economist writes that an American politician is disadvantaged from being “politically inept, morally barren and temperamentally unfit for office.”
I’m surprised the presidential ticket didn’t become a deplorable candidate calling themselves “morally barren” as if a badge of honor. Imagine posters saying “vote for me, I’ve been called politically inept”.
Thus, an oppositional politician who tried calling Americans “deplorables” was like pouring gasoline on a burning cross that only makes Americans fight harder… for the wrong side.
After all, George Washington leveraged horribly racist propaganda to amass a violent rebellion for the purposes of profit from war and preventing abolition of slavery. His take on starting a revolution against Britain was to save the poor colonial white man, stop American Blacks from being free, to stop Native Americans from gaining prosperity.
He reminds me of another famous American, a guy who gets his name put on sweatshirts and ballcaps all the time as if he wasn’t a horrible genocidal megalomaniac.
Was Leland Stanford a ‘Magnanimous’ Philanthropist or a ‘Thief, Liar, and Bigot?’
In that sense, actual underdogs had their identity appropriated by a white man and his militia who set a tone that repeatedly resurfaces in American political theater. Watching election campaigns today seems not that different from the past methods of racist propaganda. The KKK doesn’t go away because they never get effectively portrayed as the elitist, power-hungry oppressors they truly are.
During WWI, black soldiers boarding trains to leave Oklahoma City held banners that read, DO NOT LYNCH OUR RELATIVES WHILE WE ARE GONE.
And of course we all know that after WWI these black veterans and their relatives were firebombed, murdered and buried in mass graves by the KKK.
Some even argue the KKK aren’t the KKK, embedding a comical “no true Scotsman” fallacy into their defense against accountability. The oppressors are presented as some kind of fiction, allowing false underdog status to be stolen by them more casually.
