Whenever I read about the Tea Party movement, I can't help but feel like this has been done before. So, here we have the intro to the Wikipedia article about the Know-Nothing movement of the mid-19th century, heavily edited to reflect the fact that the people voting in this month's poll might be right.

The Know-Nothing Tea Party movement was a nativist American political movement of the 1840s and 1850s early 21st century. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by German and Irish Catholic Hispanic and Arab Muslim immigrants, who were often regarded as hostile to Anglo-Saxon values and controlled by the Pope in Rome Osama bin Laden. Mainly active from 1854 to 1856 2009 to 2010, it strove to curb immigration and naturalization, though its efforts met with little success. Membership was limited to Protestant males dominated by Christians of British lineage over the age of twenty-one forty. There were few prominent leaders, and the largely middle-class and entirely Protestant Christian membership fragmented over the issue of slavery social issues. Most ended up joining the Republican Party by the time of the 1860 2012 presidential election.

Every generation thinks they are somehow different, that they have encountered problems that humanity has never faced before, and that our responses are going to be more enlightened than that of our ancestors. We also believe that our results will be different. But will it be? Only the future will tell.