A Brief History --- Xenophobia, Racism, and the Republican Party

The Time Machine 

By Steven Jonas 

So Trump is at it again. His most recent racist trope is that Rep. Ilhan Omar (an elected-Representative, with a majority of the popular vote cast, who just happens to be, literally, an African-American) "hates America." This is the Trumpian version of the Leader Principle (otherwise know historically as the "Fuerher Princip"): "If you don't agree with me [on policy, e.g., national health insurance; practice, e.g., how to deal with asylum-seekers, or whatever] you are not a "true American" and "you hate your country." This is the latest in the Trumpian string of episodes racist /fascist rhetoric and practice that I wrote about last week (and actually began writing about, as noted in that column, back in 2011). Although there are a few Repubs. here and there who have taken exception at one level or another to what Trump has been laying out there in doses of increasing intensity, most are either staying silent, or supporting/excusing him, like the Dominionist, oh-so-principled, Mike Pence and Trump's Josef Goebbels imitator Stephen Miller did. 

Well, is what Trump is doing right now anything new? Is it a sudden violent departure from traditional Repub. policy? Well, no. In fact, the xenophobia part has been in the genes of the Republican Party since its beginnings. Millard Fillmore was the 13th President of the United Sates, and the last Whig to hold that office, succeeding to it upon the death of Zachary Taylor. Denied his party's Presidential nomination in 1851 he joined the American Party (otherwise known as the "Know-Nothings") and became their Presidential candidate that year. His party was known for its violent (sometime literally) antagonism towards the Irish (Catholic) immigrants who had been fleeing a very poor homeland since the 1830s, a flow that only increased with the Potato Famine in the mid-1840s. Fillmore became one of the founders of the Republican Party and brought his "know-nothingism" with him, where it festered over the years. 

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Source: OpEdNews.com