The Donald Trump revolt, presently looking so successful, reminds me of nothing so much as the Know-Nothing movement in the 1840s and '50s. Loyal and patriotic Americans, almost by definition Protestant, found themselves in fear of being overrun by Catholics, particularly Irish fleeing the potato famine.

It was not that these interlopers were largely unlettered, unskilled and with uncommon quantities of fecklessness and propensity to alcohol, brawling and crime. That could be said of many others fleeing northern Europe, not least after the collapse of old-world social and political revolutions in 1848.

Rather, the problem was that these Irishmen were Catholics. By definition, they were in thrall to the pope in Rome. They and waves of Italians were, by Protestant definition, subjects of a foreign malevolent and evil power. One, it seemed, that was particularly hell-bent, as it were, on destroying America as a bastion of freedom. To many Americans of the mid-19th century, Catholicism seemed as strange, as barbarous and intrinsically evil as radical Islam is said to be today.

Is there any wonder that some Australian Catholics, including me, see parallels between the crusades being waged by some, including Tony Abbott (a Catholic of English background) against Islamic State?

Historian John Higham has described anti-Catholicism as "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history". Arthur Schlesinger has called it "the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people".

But each was writing before September 11, 2001, and before Abbott discovered that the Islamic State movement was evil incarnate, worse even than Hitler's Nazi Party, or other bad associations.

The Pauline Hanson of the 1840s movement was Representative L.C. Levin, who repeatedly told Congress and large crowds of "the flood of immigration sweeping its millions of foreign Roman Catholics over the land … this country seems destined to be the grand theatre of Roman Catholic power ... Every shipload of immigrants was and would further be accompanied by the necessary numbers of Jesuit priests who are to locate them judiciously, with a view to the political control of certain states or the organisation of new ones in the West".

The Catholic agenda? The extinguishment of republicanism and freedom in America. "Native Americans", by which he meant male Protestant settlers, not the indigenous population, nor the slave one, and certainly not Catholics, Muslims or Jews, embodied "all that was pure in patriotism, all that was lovely in virtue".

It was the duty of such high-minded men to protect American institutions from foreign influence and to defend it against "drilled bands of armed foreigners".

"Unless some remedy be applied to this great and growing evil, the day is not far distant when the American born [white Protestant] voter will find himself in a minority in his own land."

The cynic might think that Pauline Hanson's complaints in the mid-1990s were strikingly similar, even if the villains were Indo-Chinese rather than Catholics. Hanson is now trying to give herself new life by updating her wanted list to include Muslims, just as, it seems, Abbott's new crusade for a restoration to the throne seems to turn on an Islamic Reformation. Both could learn from the Know-Nothings.

Levin, anticipating the style of Hitler and Oswald Mosley, loved to organise his rallies in the midst of Irish-Catholic neighbourhoods, so as to guarantee a good brawl and to incite popular alarm. At a number of such riots, churches and immigrant houses were destroyed by nativist zealots, and not a few were killed. Protestants sported some proud bruises and black eyes.

Another nativist, Samuel Morse (the inventor of the telegraph and Morse Code) saw the very development of the US, in colonies of (Protestant) religious refugees from Britain and Europe, as a form of revolt against Roman Catholicism and its institutions. "Our religion, the Protestant religion, and Liberty are identical, and liberty keeps no terms with despotism."

Tyrannical European monarchies were working hand in hand with the pope and the church to suppress republican and democratic movements, the great nursery of which was the US. "'Popery' neither acknowledged the right of people to govern themselves, nor tolerated liberty of the press or of conscience or of opinion."

That there were many who vehemently disagreed, just as there were many who disagreed with Hanson, is not to the point.

The pitch was not only to one's sense of oneself, as an American and a Protestant, but also to economic insecurity and fear of competition from foreign labour.

Gustavus Myers' account in the rather thick History of bigotry in the United States, points out that when the agitation was at its height, probably during the American presidential elections of 1856, foreign-born were at most one in eight of the population. Catholics were about 5 per cent, not counting (because no one did) non-citizens of Latino descent.

But, no doubt, these Irish, Italian and Mexican folk were "breeding like flies and living off the smell of an oily rag", as Australians supporting the White Australia Policy might have said.

Nativism had a rich tradition. That Catholics, and Jews, were unAmerican had occurred to a good many Americans over the previous centuries. The founding fathers had famously legislated in their federal constitution that there could be no religious test for public office and no laws against the free exercise of religion. But in much the same way that many right-thinking Americans did not consider that the right to equality and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness extended to black folk, at least if they were in southern slave states, it was widely assumed that the first amendment applied only to divisions between Protestant sects, and did not enable, or liberate, Catholics or Jews into full citizenship.

And, until after the Civil War, the religious freedom clauses did not extend to the states or state law. Many states had explicit laws, sometimes in their constitutions, formally discriminating against Catholics and Jews.

The nativist agitations occurred just as the American two-party system was under deep stress because of brawls between northern and southern politicians about the future of slavery.

The movement borrowed some of the techniques of another supposedly anti-Catholic tradition, the Masons, by forming secret societies whose members took oaths, had secret handshakes and signals, and promised never to give out information about the organisation. If asked about the groups, or what they did, members were supposed to say, "I know nothing".

In 1854, Know-Nothing candidates became governors in nine states, and dominated half a dozen legislatures, as well as many municipal governments. The party had 104 of the 234 members of the federal House of Representatives. Virtually their only platform involved the end of immigration and the disenfranchisement of Catholics and Jews.

In 1856, in a three-way presidential election, the man endorsed by the Know-Nothings, Millard Fillmore (a former US president) won 23 per cent of the vote.

Know-Nothingism ultimately failed, and became irrelevant, as the new-born Republican Party developed. On the big issue, slavery, Know-Nothings were split. Among the loudest advocates against the "Whore of Babylon" (the pope) were northern preachers adamant that slavery was wrong, a fact that made southerners deeply suspicious of the movement.

Abraham Lincoln publicly put the ambiguity.

"How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes be in favour of degrading classes of white people?" he asked in 1855. "As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal'. We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal except negroes'. When the Know-Nothings obtain control, it will read: 'all men are created equal except negroes, foreigners and Catholics'."

He forget to mention Jews, Mussulmen and people of Asian or South or Central American background.

After the Civil War was over, there were fresh agitations blaming all of the evils of the world on foreigners, Romans and Jews. Even in the defeated south, the rise of fresh self-respect coincided with the development of the Ku Klux Klan, which, if primarily devoted to continuing with the suppression of African American and the (largely successful) undoing of black citizenship, was virulently anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic.

The popularity of Donald Trump, and of others of anti-establishment and anti-political bent, is causing consternation in American Republican circles, and not a little even among Democrats, or friends and allies of the US. The Republican Party establishment detests Trump and all that he stands for but, as it appears, that is one of the reasons why Trump's popularity has proven so hard to puncture. It is among just the people who have become highly disillusioned with conventional power politics that Trump is so popular. His admirers are not much deflected by assaults on his economics, or inconsistency or proof of hypocrisy.

Trump's appeal is particularly to "real" Americans – whites, particularly of Protestant background, who have been noticeably left behind economically as America has exported semi-skilled and unskilled jobs overseas.

These are people who were once at the core of the old Democrat Party but who abandoned it two generations ago because, in part Richard Nixon better appealed to their dislike of desegregation and the sense that many Democrat politicians were elitist slobs who sneered at their "redneck" constituencies. In recent years, hard political legwork by Christian, anti-government and anti-big-government zealots has succeeded in keeping such constituencies, to the point where they are often seen to be voting against their own economic interests.

These constituencies are increasingly encouraged to see themselves as minorities in "their own" land, left out, or left behind as big government programs reach out to address the social and economic disadvantage of other groups, including blacks and Latinos. The art of populism is to package up general resentments, not least against progress, and to find villains on whom everything bad can plausibly be blamed.

Discovering that one source of the American fall from greatness is illegal workers from Central and South America, working for pittances without much in the way of a social wage, encapsulated a host of other ideas, fears and phobias.

These include resentment at the export of jobs in trade deals, the insecurity of the working class, dismay at the hollowing out of the middle class, and the belief that "traditional" Americans are being "swamped" by immigrants, many of whom do not even speak English. And, as ever, immigrants are blamed for a good deal of the crime, social distress and welfarism that has created, in America, a massive, powerful and menacing underclass. Oh, and, of course, many of these people are Catholic, of a culture alien and antipathetic to American values and providence, and, being young, are increasing in number at a far greater rate than older "real" Americans.

What a masterstroke of Trump to realise that the Mexican rapists, drug lords and no-hopers (as well as ordinary hard-working and law-abiding men, women and children) can be deported, at their own expense. And that they can be forever kept out by a 3200km Great Wall, constantly patrolled by an armed border force of a type that might even make Mike Pezzulo and Roman Quaedvlieg proud. [Ah, yes, but Australian Border Force got first pick of the camp Hugo Boss uniforms and first dip at the absence-of-humour-and-irony font.]

Some sophisticated journalists once thought Hanson would be suppressed once the populace appreciated she did not understand the meaning of the word "xenophobic". Likewise there are dedicated political warriors ready to prove that Trump's wall would be an expensive idea, a silly idea, or a counter-productive idea. Yes, but for those taken by the symbolism of the thing, who cares?

Likewise with the simple exclusion of all Muslims, forever. Or with the perpetuation of the American myth, never upset by experience, that the application of incredible force in any location will wipe out evil, or at least people opposed to the good intentions of the American people.

They didn't call the movements Know-Nothings for nothing.

The problem for a Trump is that may well achieve the passionate support of a significant rump of deeply angry and unhappy Republicans. They may at the same time push other Republican interest groups into a sullen silence, lest Hillary Clinton gain from a party split.

That a great many realistic Republican politicians realise that Trump is a disaster might not be enough to deny Trump his party's nomination or, if he is denied it, from splitting the Republican vote.

But only very hard work from Clinton could prevent her winning in a landslide of (1964) Goldwater proportions against Trump. Trump's very support depends on his having horrified any number of powerful American interest groups far bigger in size than the constituency of dispossessed rednecks. The louder, and more successful Trump is in building up his platform, the more likely that he, not Clinton, will be mobilising the forces that will bring it down. Clinton herself needs a Trump (or a Ted Cruz) to generate enthusiasm for her cause, whatever that is other than not being Trump.

Luckily for Trump, Clinton is perfectly capable of a blunder that loses her the election. But I would not bet on it. What I would fear is that she, and the Democrats, hardly care about what damage the US does to the world as they do everything with a single-minded focus on domestic politics.

I should think that the greatest favour Australia could do Trump would be to lend him Tony Abbott. Plus the technical, diplomatic, media and political skills of Pezzulo and Quaedvlieg, perhaps in showing the Americans how to really run a gulag. Or a blockade against innocent people escaping war and persecution.