When the levee breaks

William Alexander Percy's autobiography "Lanterns on the Levee" contains passages that chart the rise of resentful poor whites who overthrow the paternalistic plantation landowner class from elected offices. As a teenager in 1910 Percy witnessed a crowd of poor Mississippi whites who had assembled to listen to his father, a member of the planter ruling class, speak in his campaign for US Senate. Percy describes them as "the sort of people that lynch Negroes, that mistake hoodlumism for wit, and cunning for intelligence, that attend revivals and fight and fornicate in the bushes afterwards. They were the undiluted Anglo-Saxons. They were the sovereign voter. It was so horrible that it seemed unreal."

Even though one hundred years have passed, the current tactics of the McCain/Palin campaign show that the same ingredients- demagoguery, hatred of the "other", and baseless accusations-can be manipulated to whip the right crowd into a frenzy.