Obviously, no contemporary American history textbook fails to point out Jim Crow was a product of the Democratic south. More importantly, D’Souza (mis)uses the work of James Whitman to distort American-Nazi legal relations, as anyone who’s read the book would recognize.
As reported in the article D’Souza himself links to, he claims to draw from Whitman the influence of American racial law on Nazi Germany, the subject of Whitman’s much-praised Hitler’s American Model.
D’Souza focuses on Whitman’s evidence that there were elements of American racial laws viewed as too extreme even for the Nazis—to be understood as ‘the Democrat party was too extreme for Nazis! Can you believe it?’ Well, that’s not quite Whitman’s claim.
Of course, D’Souza can only say that Democrats were racists and American race law equaled Jim Crow. Whitman is clear that’s not right:
“Nor, importantly, was it only, or even primarily, the Jim Crow South that attracted Nazi lawyers. In the early 1930s the Nazis drew on a range of American examples, both federal and state. Their America was not just the South, it was a racist America writ much larger.”
And what was the most important set of American race laws for Nazis? Not Jim Crow segregation. It was racialized immigration restriction and citizenship laws, culminating in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that largely shut down immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.
You know, the law passed overwhelmingly by a Republican House & Republican Senate & signed by a Republican president.
And an antecedent to the policy pursued with rare vigor by the current Republican president.
And an antecedent to the policy pursued with rare vigor by the current Republican president.
The other thing that attracted Nazis was anti-miscegenation laws, which were hardly restricted to Democratic states or the south. Both the red and yellow states below had these laws in the 1930s, most dating to the mid-19th century, some the 17th! en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-misc… 
As I’ve said many, many (many) times, the point isn’t that contra D’Souza, Democrats were really innocent & it was Republicans who were racist—it’s that projecting contemporary partisanship into the past is foolish & wrong & the worst form of faux-intellectual hackery.
There were both Democrats *and* Republicans who had a racist, racialized world-view in the early 20th century. Over decades, one of those parties, whatever its inevitable failures and missteps, developed as the anti-white supremacy party. And it’s not D’Souza’s party.
