By Warner Todd Huston ——Bio and Archives--November 30, 2011
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Imagine a political movement created in a moment of terrible anxiety, its origins shrouded in a peculiar combination of manipulation and grass-roots mobilization, its ranks dominated by Christian conservatives and self-proclaimed patriots, its agenda driven by its members’ fervent embrace of nationalism, nativism and moral regeneration, with more than a whiff of racism wafting through it.
No, not that movement. The one from the 1920s, with the sheets and the flaming crosses and the ludicrous name meant to evoke a heroic past. The Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, they called it. And for a few years it burned across the nation, a fearsome thing to behold.Yeah, cuz today’s era and the Tea Party is so dang similar to the KKK and the era of the 1920s, right? What is a more natural fit, anyway? What left-winger could doubt Boyle’s hatemongering? But this is obviously absurd. Even if you accepted that some Tea Partiers are racists — and there is not a scintilla of proof of this — comparing the Tea Party to the KKK is as idiotic as comparing the local town grouch to Hitler! Of course, unlike the KKK, the Tea Party movement has precisely nothing to do with racism. So, there is no comparison at all between the two groups. The Tea Party movement is one based wholly on public policy. Quite unlike the KKK, the Tea Party has not tried to cloak itself in racial purity or religion. In fact, there isn’t anything in the Tea Party even based on social issues. The Tea Party has almost to a group rejected social issues because their point has been mostly fiscal policy and they feel that adding social issues to their operations would dilute the message and make of it just another vaguely conservative movement with no central focus. In the end, though, Boyle’s review is made less for the back hand to the Tea Party. It wasn’t necessary and he wasted two paragraphs of precious column space doing it. His ending wasn’t so hot, either. At the end of his piece he makes another idiotic, childish, and ill-fitting comparison. He compares past eras of social strife to today’s “modern anti-Islam bigots.”
At the end of the book, though, Baker steps back from her texts. Suddenly her analysis becomes more pointed. Yes, the Klan had a very short life. But it has to be understood, she contends, as of a piece with other moments of fevered religious nationalism, from the anti-Catholic riots of the antebellum era to modern anti-Islam bigots. Indeed, earlier this year, Herman Cain declared that he wouldn’t be comfortable with a Muslim in his cabinet. It’s tempting to see those moments as Pegram does the Klan: desperate, even pitiful attempts to stop the inevitable broadening of American society. But Baker seems closer to the mark when she says that there’s a dark strain of bigotry and exclusion running through the national experience. Sometimes it seems to weaken. And sometimes it spreads, as anyone who reads today’s papers knows, fed by our fears and our hatreds.This is all little but childish, partisan, facile blather. Once again Boyle and the author he’s reviewing make themselves look foolish. To compare what weak “anti-Islam bigotry” we see today — after Muslims killed thousands of Americans in a religious-based jihad — to the slave era, the Civil War, Jim Crow South, anti-Catholic fervor, or any other past era of bigotry is just plain nonsensical. In those other eras ethnic strife ended up killing people not to mention characterizing whole segments of the population, whether it be Irish, blacks, or Catholics, as the evil “other,” ostracizing them from good jobs and education. But today there is NO perceivable discrimination against Muslims in America and no crimes against them. Unfortunately, I guess we can’t expect anything more than grubbing around in false stereotypes of their own making at The New York Times, even in book reviews.
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Warner Todd Huston’s thoughtful commentary, sometimes irreverent often historically based, is featured on many websites such as Breitbart.com, among many, many others. He has also written for several history magazines, has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows.
He is also the owner and operator of Publius’ Forum.