One of the principles I have seen in History is that once you “create a machine” to deal with your enemies on undesirables, the machine will require to be fed till it it dies down (if ever) and will not stop just because the initial enemies are no longer available. That means ne enemies will be created by means of loosening the parameters (AKA moving the goalposts.) We saw this with two historical examples: The French Revolution and the Soviet Purges.
The Klan was created to deal with the “Negro menace” and it was astute enough to imbed itself in the power corridors so it would remain untouched or at least get warnings of upcoming troubles. But the time came when the “Negro Menace” was pretty much under control and the machine still needed to be fed and that meant setting their sights on other prospects.
Morals were the excuse for the actions of the Klan. They could not allow the Good White Folks to be affected by the perceived moral inferiority of the Black race so they acted upon that. The problem was that the same very loose definition of morals got looser and ended up being used against White people because the machine needed to still be fed. That is why you see Klan chapters supporting Prohibition and Temperance before it was cool or Federal. And that is why you see them going into a house in the middle of the night to whip a white woman for allegedly stepping out on her husband.
I fear we refuse to learn from the past.
“The machine still needed to be fed” is something you can see all over government programs. The EPA has pretty much cured real pollution, so to justify its parasitical existence it is now pretending that an essential nutrient (carbon dioxide) is a pollutant, and creating expensive “solutions” to deal with this “problem”.
In general, government programs to address problem X will not ever cure problem X, since success means the program would end. Instead, the bureaucrats in the “battle against X agency” strive to increase their empire, by not solving X and using its continued existence as an excuse for more funding, and/or by redefining the problem so the X they are working on is ever shifting and ever growing.