A month before the 1968 presidential election Alabama Governor George Wallace had the backing of 23% of the American people.
Comparing ’68 with this year, it is not a stretch in the least to say that Donald Trump is today’s version of George Wallace. Consider the following similarities.
Wallace’s campaign theme was “Stand Up For America.” Trump’s is “Make America Great Again.” Wallace described Washington as a place run by “pointy-headed intellectuals” who thrived on “government pussy-footing” and who encouraged people to become “sissy-britches welfare” loafers.
Trump uses different words to say the same thing.
Wallace also said that America needed a president who stood for “law and order,” almost the first words out of Trump’s mouth in the second debate. And just as Trump attacks Mexicans and Muslims as threats to America, Wallace attacked “pothead hippies.”
Wallace said his campaign was for the “little guy” who had been forgotten by Washington, but he never gave any details about what he would do to help anyone, how he would govern, or what he would planned to do about the country’s problems.
He was content to play on people’s fears, anxieties, and anger to champion state’s rights and turn them against their own federal government. And it came close to working.
Our nation was in turmoil in ’68 and Wallace worked it effectively, carrying 5 states and securing 48 electoral votes. Had he won North Carolina and Tennessee and Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey won Ohio, the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives.
Richard Nixon ended up winning (by only .07 of 1 percent), but in the long run both the nation and the Republican Party lost.
The reason was Nixon’s “Southern strategy” designed by the late Lee Atwater, an unethical political consultant if there ever was one.
It was all about “dog whistle” politics where a candidate uses coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup.
That’s how Nixon could beat Wallace in the South, Atwater argued. He could talked about “law and order,” for example, but the deeper message people would hear was his sympathy for southerners who were fed up with “black power,” street protests for civil rights and against the Viet Nam War, and who hated the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
In winning the way he did, though, Nixon laid the foundation for Wallace being reincarnated in Donald Trump by bringing southern white, middle class, blue collar workers into the Republican Party who had never gotten any help from Republicans, but who also didn’t like the social changes the nation was undergoing and who were beginning to feel like their way of life was being replaced by a world they didn’t understand or like.
Ironically, Nixon did not share most of the views of the southerners who voted for him. He had never opposed civil rights or supported segregation. He believed in Social Security and Medicare, going to far as to propose a national healthcare plan not so different from Obamacare. He also supported U.S. involvement in both NATO and the UN, and even cared enough about the environment to establish the EPA.
But it was his use of dog whistle politics to prevent George Wallace from taking votes from him that sowed the seeds of his own party moving so far right that today it would welcome Wallace with open arms.
It is this history that forms the context for understanding the appeal of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric.
Questioning the birthplace of President Obama, talking about building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico to keep out “bad hombres” (i.e., Mexicans), urging police to patrol known Muslim neighborhoods, and implying Hillary Clinton was weak on terrorism because she refused to use term “radical Islamic terrorists, this is all vintage George Wallace political talk.
Indeed, if Wallace were the Republican Party’s presidential nominee today, I have no doubt the people supporting Trump would be supporting him without missing a step.
So excuse me if I am not moved when they whine about not feeling represented in Washington. That would give them too much credit.
They want to go back to an old America, an America that ignored racism, sexism, and all forms of inequality while ostracizing gays and lesbians as sexual deviants and treated women as if they could and should not think for themselves.
That’s the America George Wallace wanted, and to our nation’s credit the majority of Americans had the character and the courage to say NO to it.
I can only hope we will again.
linnposts.com 