As Hate-Mongers Go, George Wallace Was a Novice Compared to Trump [View all]

More than once over the last three years, Donald Trump's political ruffianism has drawn comparisons to another notorious practitioner of the dark arts of demagoguery and division, four-time Alabama governor and three-time presidential candidate George C. Wallace.

Wallace's political approach back in Alabama was largely based on the tried and true race- and Yankee-baiting model favored by generations of Southern segregationist politicians before him. A similar but more evolved and complex modus operandi won him 34% of the 1964 Democratic presidential primary vote in Wisconsin and a whopping 43% in Maryland. Running for president as an independent four years later, the same M.O. had pollsters projecting him with nearly 20% of the vote scarcely six weeks before the general election balloting.

It is this latter, national campaign strategy that offers the sounder—and scarier—comparisons with the Trumpian onslaught of 2019. For example, considering Wallace’s standing in the polls in September 1968, one might detect a painfully familiar ring in The New York Times’ confident assertion seven months earlier that "since Mr. Wallace is an ignorant, mean-spirited adventurer without personally attractive or socially redeeming qualities… The longer he campaigns the weaker he will become." As befits the Times' lengthy record of being strikingly out of touch with mass opinion in the United States, its editors had seriously underestimated the truly national scope of a white backlash triggered by the rise of black militancy and urban violence, the northward shift of school integration pressures, student protests and the perceived excesses of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs.

Showing an instinctive genius for melding racial animosity and socioeconomic anxiety into a high-impact political bludgeon, Wallace ranted away against “senseless, asinine busing” while mocking liberal ”pseudo-intellectuals" who "explain it away" when "someone goes out and burns down half the city and murders someone… by saying the killer didn't get any watermelon when he was 10 years old." Wallace’s racial dog-whistling may have come across as a tad bit cruder than Trump’s has—to date, at least—but the more noteworthy difference in political styles between the two lies in how they chose to target the hate and fear they so expertly weaponized.

Read more: https://flagpole.com/news/cobbloviate/2019/08/21/as-hate-mongers-go-george-wallace-was-a-novice-compared-to-trump