Opinion | George Wallace Has an Heir Apparent

I have to admit I have been fascinated by Wallace since I read Dan T. Carter’s excellent biography, “The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism and the Transformation of American Politics.” Wallace was, without question, one of the most talented politicians of his generation, a man who could turn, as Cowie observes, defeat on the policy into victory on the politics. Unfortunately for the country, Wallace’s many talents were tethered to an amorality that led him over just a few years to drop the racial moderation of his early career and embrace the most virulently segregationist views imaginable.

In going through Cowie’s account of Wallace’s career, I was struck by how skillfully the demagogue articulated this freedom to dominate, weaving it into a narrative that leveraged the sacred symbols of American democracy. Specifically, here is Wallace confronting the deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach as federal authorities attempt to carry out a court order to integrate the University of Alabama. Wallace, Cowie writes,

began what amounted to a five-minute diatribe on states’ rights. “The unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted, and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama today of the might of the Central Government offers frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this state by officers of the federal government.” The “threat of force” from the feds lay outside of law and justice. He lectured everyone on the import of the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” It was only because he was there, Wallace claimed, that thousands of angry Alabamians were not there in his stead. He would not accept trampling on “the exercise of the heritage of freedom and liberty under the law.”

Reading this, it is not all that hard to see how Wallace was able to bring his message to the nation at large, blending anti-Black racism together with opposition to the federal state into a new, potent brew.

A final thought: Wallace was a smart, clever and intellectually agile man. We are probably lucky that our demagogue, dangerous as he is, lacks those particular attributes. Even so, if Wallace has a legacy in national politics, it is very clearly Trump.

What I Wrote

Because of the holiday, I had just one column this week, on the unfortunate truth that it is politics, and not facts, that will determine and shape the meaning of Jan. 6 for the broad public, not to mention the future:

The struggle for the meaning of Jan. 6 will, like the struggle over the significance of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, resolve itself only through politics. And in much the same way that the collapse of Reconstruction and the political victory of so-called Redeemers heralded the ideological victory of the Klan’s defenders, sympathizers and apologists, it is Trump’s ultimate fate that will shape and determine our lasting memory of what happened on Jan. 6.

I have also been active on the new Opinion blog with a few bite-size takes. I wrote about the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and as I mentioned above, the reality of Donald Trump’s political record.