Oh that traitorous commie pinko, Abraham Lincoln.

-A man who became this country's first Republican president running on a protectionist platform against the "free" trade promoted by Southern plantation owners and in favor of tariffs that nurtured northern industry.

-A man who proposed giving free homes and land to frontier settlers and investing in agricultural advances that would create an agrarian middle class of white people who helped to power America to become the most prosperous nation on earth in the decades following Lincoln's presidency.

-A poor man with little formal education who was born in the slave state of Kentucky and grew up in log cabins in the backwoods along the Ohio River to Baptists yet one who was enlightened enough to know that slavery was wrong and was bad for whites as well as blacks and who thought the biggest sustaining economic engines for this country would be free public education and infrastructure investment rather than slave labor (as I wrote about a little bit already in the diary, What Lincoln Would Tell Obama About the Economy).

Know-Nothings, on the other hand, were not so enlightened and there were some skilled politicians who found a clear path to power in channeling and stoking the fear of WASPS whose families had been in the country for a few generations as they saw immigrants coming in droves from Europe to escape famine and poverty, especially stoking their fear of the Irish and German Catholics because of their ties to the pope. I see this really as no different now of the way Republicans scapegoat Spanish-speaking immigrants, blacks and Muslims to get ignorant white votes today.

Yet given how much less educated people were back then, why did the majority of Americans not give into the Know-Nothing movement even as the country became so fiercely divided in the 1850s by the slavery question?

Well because thankfully a lot of the American people are inherently good and wise. And so when the dreadful Dred Scott decision came down, Protestant churches that understood the moral ill of slavery was a greater threat to American life than the Catholics posed got their congregations out of this Know-Nothing mindset and moved toward the Republican Party. Those in the north also knew Republican policies of free public education and protectionist trade policies were in their economic self-interest, which was very important, especially as they coped with the devastating Panic of 1857.

The result of Abe's new party was a Republican dynasty in presidential politics that lasted for decades to come just as FDR's New Deal coalition.

Sure, various Know-Nothing sentiments have by no means faded from public life but simply ebbed and flowed at various times in America's history since then with many dire consequences from the "Birth of a Nation" and Ku Klux Klan inspiring lynchings and other attacks on the rights of "free" black people to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and from the rabid anti-Communist agenda that gave us the disasters in Cuba and Vietnam to the latest anti-Muslim crusades that have given us the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Yet I think it can be safely said that at no point has one of our two main parties come to so completely crystallize every negative aspect of Know-Nothingness than has the Republican Party with its anointing of its standard bearer a woman who seems to literally know nothing in Sarah Palin.

Just two years ago Weekly Standard editor and idiot Republican standardbearer William Kristol warned Republicans that with their anti-immigrant sentiment they were coming dangerously close to slipping into irrelevance as a modern day Know-Nothing Party.

Now? Kristol knows nothing about those earlier misgivings and is a card carrying charter member of the Sarah Palin as savior of the Republican Party fan club.

Palin.

A woman who relishes stoking fires and white fears against immigrants and foreigners, rather than calling out the big businesses that exploit them so that America's economy fails all people.

A woman who has no use for free education or free speech or freedom of the press and ethical behavior in government and separation of church and state but only looks to the Constitution to justify her free guns and her free market.

A woman who subscribes to an extremely disturbing brand of Christianity that preaches militant divisiveness and theocracy rather than peaceful coexistence and harmonious democracy.

As such, even as I take glee in how well Barack Obama is doing in this election and how John McCain and Sarah Palin's flailing campaign is driving most non-racists and sane people into the arms of the Democrats, I can't help but feel a little bad for Abraham at how the neo-cons and neo-Nazis and crony capitalists and fascist theocrats have perverted his vision for America.

In addition, like Bob Dylan, I can't even be mad at these know-nothing racists themselves as I recognize that for at least as long as Reagan, these ignorant fools have only been pawns in Wall Street's game.

I hope on Nov. 4, a majority of Americans show they still know something and make the right decision in this election just as they did in 1860.