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Daniel Day Lewis is shown in a scene from Martin Scorcese's film Gangs of New York.MARIO TURSI

Mitch Potter pens a good primer on the Tea Party movement in the United States.

His thesis is that America's educated elites - on both the right and left - are rapidly falling out of favour with the mass electorate, opening the door to a resolutely anti-intellectual candidate (Sarah Palin, anyone?).

The United States has a long history of nativist or populist movements specifically aimed against shadowy elites, particularly during difficult economic times.

The 1930s were rife with Huey Longs and Father Charles Coughlins. These were rabid populist rabble-rousers pointing to hidden enemies among the powerful to blame for the Depression.

William Jennings Bryan secured the Democratic Party nomination three separate times, fighting for taking the dollar off the gold standard, sparking inflation to free farmer's from debt. He was opposed by the Eastern educated elite, then housed in the Republican Party. (The Wizard of Oz is actually a parable about Bryan and his movement.)

The best analogy to today's Tea Party was the - and this is their real name - Know-Nothing Party of the antebellum era. These anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant nationalists were appalled by the hordes of German and Irish newcomers and wanted a wall around America. Some of their rhetoric could be replayed at a Tea Party event without a soul noticing.

Most of these movements fail to break through at the national level, although some argue the Reagan revolution in 1980 and the presidency of Andrew Jackson were episodes when populism ran the table.

(I disagree. Reagan was supported by a robust intellectual movement. While his rhetoric was anti-elitist, the reality saw him drawing on the highly educated as much as the resolutely ignorant. And Andrew Jackson was less a populist than a "westerner," with the "west" then being places like Tennessee.)

We have seen the same trend flaring in Canada.

Sales tax is an obvious example.

Stephen Harper's GST cut was an admitted political play to curry favour with voters. Its policy merits are far more dubious than its popularity, but the cries of a thousand economists didn't halt the costly shift from taxing consumption to income.

Some of the coolness toward Michael Ignatieff may be a part of a wider trend at present. Certainly, earlier academics from Mackenzie King to Pierre Trudeau to Kim Campbell had no problem capturing the popular imagination.

Expect more sweaters and Tim Hortons cups from all parties this year as strategists seek to go down market at a time when fancy words and "inter-dependent productivity gains"-type language is out of favour.

(Photo: Daniel Day Lewis is shown in a scene from the film Gangs of New York. His character, Bill "the Butcher" Cutting, was a fictionalized version of Know Nothing leader William Poole. AFP)

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