Another moment of history rhyming?

My eclectic reading has, today, including a little more on a biography of Thomas Meagher: “The Immortal Irishman”, by Timothy  Egan. In the section “To be Irish in America” (there’s a couple of minor  errors in the Section “To be Irish in Australia), the author describes the violently xenophobic “Know Nothing” movement (the title came from the advice they gave their thugs to tell the police that they “know nothing”).

Is this another moment of history rhyming? There seem to me to be parallels between the Know Nothings of the 1800s in the USA (and their parallel xenophobic and violently racist “White Australia” cousins of content of that era in my nation) and the more recent Tea Party and white supremacist movements - and, in fact, the whole so-called neoliberal movement, including its current distortion of the conservative party in Australia (also influenced by neochristians).