American echoes

 It wasn't long before the attacks began. The ranks of the Know-Nothings swelled. What was happening to the United States was a conquest, they claimed, indirect and unplanned, by foreign hordes, unknowing of OUR WAYS, with foreign values.

-- Timothy Egan, "The Immortal Irishman", of the Irish-Catholic diaspora of the 1840s

It's not racist to say you don't want Muslims in America.

-- Current Vice-President JD Vance, not a Know-Nothing as far we, well, know

Someone smarter than most of us once said history doesn't so much repeat as reverberate. Its echoes tumble down the years from one age to the next, fetching up in the present with only the details altered, not the substance.

Which brings us to the two quotations above.

The first, as noted, is from the 1840s, when a political movement grounded in anti-Catholic hysteria decided the Irish fleeing the Great Famine were militant Papists whose goal was not the opportunity America presented for a better life, but its subjugation to Rome.  If the "invasion" of Irish-Catholics was not checked, the Know-Nothings warned, soon all of America would be bowing to the Pope.

And the second quotation?

It advances an increasingly strident -- and startlingly familiar -- political theme that Muslims in America are militant Islamists whose goal is not the opportunity America presents for a better life, but its subjugation to Mohammed. If the "invasion" of Muslims is not checked, JD Vance and his ilk warn, soon all of America will be bowing to the mullahs.

In both cases the message is identical: Roman Catholics/Muslims aren't really Americans, they don't share our common values, they are incompatible with our culture. Or as Egan went on to write of the Know-Nothings' warnings: "No country on earth had tried to form a common bond without common ancestry -- it could not be done. And America was not by design a haven for the world's rejects ..."

At which point the echoes of  1840s America become thunderous. It's as if the anti-Muslim bigots -- no, not racists, but certainly bigots -- are reciting the Know-Nothings' spiel word-for-word.

Everything changes and nothing changes, in other words. The fear and loathing that has greeted almost every succeeding immigrant class from the Irish onward employs the same weary rhetoric, advances the same weary ideology, fuels itself with the same weary ignorance.

And we should be weary of all of it -- or at least recognize it as the divide-and-conquer boogaloo charlatans and scoundrels have employed to hold onto power since the founding of the nation.

Speaking of which, let's go back to JD Vance echoing what a lot of his fellow travelers have been saying out loud: That Islam is fundamentally incompatible with American "culture" (despite the fact our "culture" is not one but many), and therefore its followers should be cast out of the country no matter what the Constitution says.

The great irony, of course, is that's exactly the sort of religious bigotry that drove the Pilgrims to our shores to begin what we now call America.  And the other irony?

That JD Vance would so perfectly echo the old Know-Nothings.

Because JD Vance, you see, is Roman Catholic.