...But there’s a configuration of ideas we might call the Klan Komplex — a combination of Lost Cause mythology, John Calhoun’s* misinterpretation of the Constitution and miscasting of the Founders, love of guns, and hatred of the federal government — that survives to this day in radical right-wing fringe groups. Today many of these ideas sound like nonsense to outsiders, but the whole Komplex makes sense if you picture yourself as a defeated Southern aristocrat watching victorious Union troops side with your former slaves against you, and looking to the heroic knights of the KKK to restore you to your rightful dominance.

* The federal government is illegitimate, having grossly exceeded the authority legitimately granted by the Constitution. Government officials have no claim to represent the American people.
* The Founders were divinely inspired men whose vision has been betrayed.
* The true federal government was an agreement among the states, and had no direct authority over the American people.
* The Founders intended states’ rights to be paramount and the federal government to be weak.
* Slavery in the old South was a benevolent institution. Through slavery, African savages were civilized and taught Christianity. They were treated well by their masters.
* Slavery is the worst thing that can happen to a white man. Any time the federal government forces a white man to do something he doesn’t want to do, he is being enslaved.
* Federal taxes are confiscation.
* The federal government has corrupted blacks by removing them from the benevolent authority of whites and giving them goods that it has confiscated from whites. Blacks are addicted to these government handouts, and through that addiction the government dominates them more completely than their masters ever did.
* The United States was founded to be a white Christian nation. Non-whites and non-Christians have been generously allowed to settle and prosper here, but now they are illegitimately taking over.
* States can nullify federal laws.
* States have the right to secede, and the South was right to do so.
* The Second Amendment was put into the Bill of Rights so that citizens could overthrow the federal government if it exceeded its authority.
* The vast armament of private citizens is the only thing that keeps the federal government from establishing tyranny. Armed citizens ready to revolt against the federal government are the true American patriots.

Those ideas are not related to each other in any logical sense, so it would certainly be possible to believe a few of them without the others. But they originated together in the defeated South and have spread through the same channels ever since. As a result, although lots of people believe one or two of these ideas, if you hear more than a few of them from someone, probably you’ll eventually hear all the rest. When well-armed white men are rabidly opposed to the federal government and talk at length about their love of their own freedom, chances are excellent that they will eventually start waxing nostalgic about slavery, as Cliven Bundy did.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone.

http://weeklysift.com/2014/04/28/cliven-bundy-and-the-klan-komplex/