Sam Allis’s amazing lack of perspective
Boston Globe’s Beacon Hill (ie. State House) columnist Sam Allis has a filler piece on the Know Nothings, as the members of the American Party were known in the 1850′s. The American Party was nativist and abolitionist and it also championed the kind of work laws that militaristic Prussia would later enact to protect its human stock (of potential soldiers) from overuse. Writes Allis:
The Know-Nothings were breathtaking political schizoids — progressive abolitionists who desegregated Boston’s public schools on one hand, and virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic bigots on the other. They tried to institute a 10-hour workday, yet wanted immigrants to wait 21 years for citizenship.
They tried, again unsuccessfully, to eliminate prison sentences for debtors, then had the gall to investigate nunneries. (More on this later.) They were temperance folks who drastically limited the availability of booze, and then required that the King James Bible, which was offensive to Catholics, be read in public schools every day.
Yes, how could a party favor its country’s citizens over aliens? How mysterious and alien that thought must be to Allis. Of course, the Know Nothings were the flip side of today’s democrats. Take for example Massachusetts senior Senator Ted Kennedy. He’s in favor of raising the minimum wage in order to help the working class/poor/families. At the same time, he protects the mass immigration that is driving so many wages down, closer to the legally minimum. I assume Kennedy could be labled a politcial schizoid using Allis’s model, but that assumption would be intellectual laziness. Kennedy is not a political schizoid, he is a man with a plan. I believe that plan is to create a government-dependent underclass large enough to destroy American capitalism through the ballot system, to replace capitalism with Scandinavian-style socialism.
Luckily for him his No-Child-Left-Bhind buddy, President George W Bush, has similar means to create a slightly different outcome: To create a government-subsidized underclass large enough to protect Corporate America from ever having to raise its workers’ wages.
Hence we have mass immigration and rapid expansion of government on all levels of society. Now, there’s something any Boston Globe reporter can love.
