Tobin on anti-immigrant rhetoric.
I know some of my fellow bloggers don’t care for Tom’s outlook, but sometimes he nails it. In the D&C political blog, he’s got a post entitled “Know-Nothings are back”, which I will quote in it’s entirety:
The Know-Nothings are back And their name is Lou Dobbs. And that other guy on radio and TV who sort of bellows his occasionally humorous sarcasm and believes we are in mortal danger from undocumented aliens. This is a population that has grown to 12 or 15 millions over many years and from which, as I far as I know, not one murderous terrorist has arisen. The 9/11 bunch was here legally. What we’re coming to now is a kind of undifferentiated hatred and fear of foreigners that the creepy radio and TV people are exploiting for their own financial gain. When the nativists of the mid-19th century were tooling around beating up the new immigrants, they similarly were led by rumor and loose talk. The millennium is a new sun. But nothing has changed beneath it.
By calling them “Know-Nothings”, Tobin is of course referring to the Know Nothing movement, a group from the mid-1850’s known both for their ignorance and for their extreme nativism. Those are two qualities with which modern Republicans are intimately familiar - qualities of the Republican base that they hope to fan into a fire of anti-immigrant hatred and electoral success in 2008.
It’s sad, really, that a political party (Republican) that could once claim fiscal conservatism as one of it’s trademarks has completely devolved into a bunch of bottom-feeding hate-mongers. Immigrants - and by “immigrants”, they mean Mexicans - are just the latest target in a long tradition of divisive politics, going back to the civil rights movement (as Exile pointed out in a previous post.)
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I actually like Tobin okay. It’s our commenters who hate him, not our posters.
I usually think he’s OK, too, in a moderate kind of way.
The Know Nothing Party in the 19th Century was primarily an anti-immigrant party, at a time when the hated immigrants du jour were mostly Irish. In the 1850s, certain elements of the Know Nothings and other groups of various political belieft coalesced into a new national political party. What was the name of that party? You guessed it…it was the Republican party.
From Encyclopedia Americana is the following description of Know Nothings: “Despite their strength and appeal, the Know-Nothings were already in decline as a national party by 1856. Beset by differences over the slavery issue, many members joined the Republican party, which seemed sympathetic to much of their nativism and offered additional appeals on other important issues. Know-Nothing parties remained strong in a number of Northern states in the late 1850s, but the party was spent as a national force before the election of 1860.
The Know-Nothing movement illustrated two things: a persistent ethnoreligious hostility in American life that often intruded into politics and the potentiality for political disruption when existing parties fail to deal adequately with volatile social and political tensions. Although the movement quickly lost out to the Republicans, its ideas did not, and they formed one aspect of the Republican appeal for more than a generation to come.”
A LOT more than a generation to come…