Destructive Populism

Of whom was the writer below speaking? The Tea Party? Occupy Wall Street? Radicals, socialists, right-wing conservatives, libertarians who? Answer, any disliked minority or perceived, destructive minority.

In 1885, in Washington State, this comment appeared in the Tacoma Ledger asking if American citizens would allow “an army of leprous, prosperity-sucking, progress-blasting Asiatics to befoul our thoroughfares, degrade the city, repel immigration, drive out our people, break up our homes, take employment from our countrymen, corrupt the morals of our youth, establish opium joints, buy or steal the babe of poverty or slave, and taint with their brothers the lives of our young men?”

Therefore, in 1886, the Chinese encountered violence or expulsion. The legendary time when men and women worked together in frontier towns with a sense of community was disappearing. Labor and business – the lower element and the better element, began to view themselves and each other from different perspectives. Again, does any of this sound familiar today?

Forces responsible for the anti-Chinese movement created the People’s Party, the 1st reformist organization in the Northwest; even though dissociated from socialists, anarchists and other extremists, party members nevertheless fought the business men.
Change the names but not the animus, and surely there’s relevance to our current political and cultural climate.