[Peace-discuss] An analogue for the Tea Party

[C. G. Estabrook]

"Of course, there are many flavors in the tea party blend. There are nuts and 
opportunists, as in any political formation. You can trace some of its ideology 
back to the nineteenth-century Know-Nothings, a typical platform of which, in 
1841, called for extending the term of naturalization to twenty-one years, 
restricting public office to the native-born (there's your birther movement), 
keeping the Bible in schools and resisting 'the encroachment of a foreign civil 
and spiritual power upon the institutions of our country.' Back then this meant 
the Vatican; today it's Davos, Bilderberg, the UN, the IPCC."


The Know-Nothings were a nativist American political movement of the 1840s and 
1850s, motivated by fear that the country was being overwhelmed by German and 
Irish Catholic immigrants, regarded as hostile to U.S. values and controlled by 
the Pope in Rome. Mainly active from 1854 to 1856, the largely middle-class and 
entirely Protestant membership fragmented along sectional lines. Most ended up 
joining a new insurgent political party sponsored by expansionist Northern 
agriculturalists and industrialists by the time of the 1860 presidential election.

The movement originated in New York in 1843 as the American Republican Party. It 
spread to other states as the Native American Party and in 1855 renamed itself 
the American Party. Given the party's fear of opposition from the political 
establishment, members were supposed to reply "I know nothing" when asked about 
the party.

Allowing for both the similarities and differences over 165 years of American 
history, it's reasonable to see the Know-Nothings and the Tea Partiers as 
analogous petit bourgeois movements.  --CGE

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