SPEAKING OF CIVIL WAR, consider two versions of “populism” in that era.
The Know-Nothings were one of the best-named political movements of all time. At their peak in 1854, they won elections nationwide, preaching nativist and anti-immigrant sentiments. They claimed to defend ordinary “real” Americans against a wave of suspicious new immigrants. These were were mostly the dangerous, drunken, smelly, crime-plagued Irish Catholics (or, in San Francisco, the Chinese). The Know-Nothings even had a 19th Century version of Great Replacement Theory, insisting that hordes of Irish peasants had been sworn in at the last moment to steal the 1856 election.
And they owned the stupidity of this. They were proud to “know nothing” beyond the basic truth: this was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, and everything else was nonsense. It was a uniting, disciplining ideology, a celebration of stupidity, a choice of tribe over principle. It was MAGA.
Then look at the Wide-Awakes. In 1860, with Southern states already swearing to secede, young people around the north began staging pro-Union marches. They were “wide awake” to the threat posed by secession, and behind it, slavery. It was an idealistic movement, youthful, spontaneous, leaderless, and creative. They adopted colorful robes and staged dramatic night marches with oil lamps, made and distributed comic books, and gave displays of gymnastics to show they were fit to fight. Five hundred thousand people joined, from Chicago to Hartford, to save the republic. They weren’t necessarily abolitionists, but resented the infamous “3/5ths compromise” allowed a narrow caste of wealthy slave owners—just 400,000 out of 31 million citizens—to control American politics, and even destroy the country, against the will of the majority. They wanted equality, and solidarity.The Wide-Awakes were woke, the social justice warriors of their time.
The Know-Nothings disappeared almost instantly, disgraced by corruption and stupidity, doomed to irrelevance by the looming Civil War.
The Wide-Awakes went on to fill the ranks of the Union Army, and bring victory, but they are almost forgotten today (failed attempt). But the Know-Nothings rise again and again, propelled by the simplest of all thinking: us over them. Tribalism.
We need a bigger sense of tribe, one that extends to more and more people.
What do you make of some of today's wide-awakes that are so wide-awake, they are sleep deprived; so righteous in their rightness, never questioning what they hear in their own echo chamber, that, without even knowing it, they have have become know-nothings?