much like the Tea Party in our time.
Northern and Southern branches were just
as divided over the issue of slavery as was
the Democratic Party in the 1850s, which
also began to break apart into two distinct
camps. The rise of the newly founded
Republican Party in the Northern states
also siphoned off Know Nothing support.
Fillmore managed to get 21 percent of the
vote in the 1856 presidential election and
win Maryland (which was bitterly divided
over slavery, then legal in the state). But that
was not the start of a national party; it was
the end of one.
Though the political movement collapsed,
the anti-immigrant nativism of the Know
Nothings never really went away. Even
during the Civil War, when all other issues
were subsumed, the passions stirred by the
Know Nothings were never far from the
surface. The New York Draft Riots of 1863
were in part an uprising of Irish immigrants
after years of discrimination, with African-
Americans bearing the brunt of their rage.
After the Civil War, a Republican-controlled
Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act
of 1882, which banned all immigration for
20 years. Those currents also worked their
way into the Populist and Progressive move-
ments of the late 19th and early 20th centu-
ries, which ultimately became a prominent
strain of both parties, the Republicans under
Teddy Roosevelt and the Democrats during
the Woodrow Wilson years.
T
HERE ARE LESSONS here for the
Republican Party today. History
doesn’t repeat itself. It does, as Mark
Twain is reputed to have quipped, often
rhyme, which means that its echoes reso-
nate over subsequent generations in ways
that can offer guidance, though never clear
pathways. One lesson for 2021 Republicans
is that being purely against something and
someone can take you only so far. The
Know Nothings needed the surge in immi-
gration of the 1840s, and needed economic
and political conditions to be perfectly
aligned, to create an opening for a move-
ment whose ideas were largely unidimen-
sional, or at least monotonal.
In their policy goals, the Know Nothings
were in part a reformist party representing
working Americans against the elite; they
ended up passing a variety of laws about
working conditions that presaged the union
and labor movements after the Civil War.
But the movement was founded, and grew,
purely on the strength of anger and resent-
ment. And only because of instability in
the political system—the collapse of the
Whigs and the widening divisions between
Northern and Southern Democrats—was
there an opening for them in the first place.
The last word^37
more potent national movement. But even
then, he never truly managed to deliver
results, or to bend the government to his
loose collection of ideas; a faction with one
primary ethos subsumed to one primary
leader could have been viable long-term only
if Trump had actually managed to decon-
struct the government systems in a way that
he largely failed to do.
Without that kind of success to build
a broader base, the QAnon wing now
threatens to push Republicans much closer
to the fate of the Know Nothing Party,
even though they don’t know it. Many
Republican voters, like Know Nothing
voters in the mid-1850s, have legitimate
grievances about economic equity and
opportunity, but the party itself rests on
deeper and more exclusionary currents of
conspiracy, us-versus-them anti-immigration,
and nativism. Trump remains the party’s
most important figurehead, even out of
power, but the fervent supporters who keep
him there aren’t mainstream voters but
hard-to-control online cells and local parties.
That doesn’t mean that all GOP voters
buy into all of that—not even close. But it
means that the party itself will struggle to
survive as an organizing force without that
energy, and will be limited as a national
party because of it. That limit is the lesson
of the Know Nothings.
It’s possible that the Republicans will
evolve, even though the Know Nothings
couldn’t. It’s also possible that political
movements have changed enough in the
early 21st century that a minority party
with a conspiratorial bent and a small
menu of adversarial issues can consolidate
power in a large and messy democracy. But
the latter isn’t likely, and it wouldn’t be a
good bet for the Republican Party to think
that it found a viable model after four years
of Trump.
A final lesson of the Know Nothings is
that those voters aren’t going anywhere
even if the party begins to fall apart. Some
may be lost to conspiracy thinking and
hence best not indulged; some may be
racist (though some Democratic voters are
all those things as well). Many are simply
legitimately angry at a political class that
has failed them, and an economy that has
changed too quickly and too disruptively,
and the vehicle they’ve chosen is a deeply
flawed one. The task ahead is to address
the plaints that are distinct from conspir-
acy and nativism—and to recognize that
some of the voters do know something,
even as their party knows nothing.This article was originally published in
Politico.com. Used with permission.The party recruited former President Fillmore.Even then, populist outrage could only pro-
pel them to statehouses and to the House
of Representatives. Then, as now, those are
the most fruitful avenues for grassroots and
single-issue campaigns. Gaining larger blocs
of support as a national movement is much
more challenging and requires organization
and coherence, and the ability to build and
maintain some kind of coalition.
Conspiracy theories, which were the core
DNA of the Know Nothings, have coher-
ence in their way, but they do best when
they avoid the light of public scrutiny. As
a local phenomenon, Know Nothingism
thrived; as a national movement, it could
only go so far before it splintered, fractured,
and collapsed.
That is one likely path for the Republican
Party today, if the Trumpian-conspiracy
wing keeps its vital place in the party.
Trump reached office by loudly giving voice
to undercurrents that the Republican Party
had largely kept in check, and had he been
re-elected, it’s of course possible that his
long grip on power would have led to a