Jack White: White Backlash, Part Deux

Jack White, a frequent contributor to The Root, is a longtime observer of national politics.

During the turbulent 1960s and '70s, segregationists like Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Boston anti-busing rabble-rouser Louise Day Hicks whipped up what was then known as "the White Backlash." It was nothing less than an all-out effort to use mob rule to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement and drive blacks back into second-class citizenship. It was a tactic that propelled Richard Nixon and, later, Ronald Reagan, to the presidency.

And now, 50 years later, we're going through what Yogi Berra might call déjà vu all over again. Or maybe it's a true-life version of Ground Hog Day. But whatever you call it, we've seen this horror movie before -- call it White Backlash Part Deux. The Tea Party is no prettier this time around than it was in its previous incarnations. If Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry ever makes it to the White House, the backlash will deserve much of the blame.

That's the gloomy conclusion I reached this week after reading a portrait of the Tea Party movement drawn by political scientists David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam, authors of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. In an op-ed piece for the New York Times, Campbell and Putnam confirm what many of us already knew and were deeply troubled about: Rather then being something new and spontaneous, the Tea Party is just the White Backlash gussied up in a tricornered hat, waving a flag reading, "Don't Tread on Me."...

...when I hear [Rick] Perry sneering that the chairman of the Federal Reserve should get "ugly" treatment for his potentially "treasonous" conduct of monetary policy, or that global climate change is a hoax cooked up by scheming scientists, the rhetoric is all too familiar.

It's the voice of George Wallace, inveighing against "pointy-headed intellectuals," and Nixon's hatchet man Spiro T. Agnew denouncing the "nattering nabobs of negativism."...