Opinion | George Wallace Has an Heir Apparent

In a post for the new Opinion blog — which you should read! — I argued that there’s nothing mysterious or hard to grok about Donald Trump’s appeal to a large segment of American voters.

It is not hard to find, throughout American history, Trump-like demagogues with loyal followings. And these men tend to represent, most often, the popular expression of a certain will to power — the freedom to dominate. In practical terms, this means the freedom of the settler to seize the land around him and expel its original inhabitants, or it can mean the freedom of the master to expropriate the labor of others. Either way, these demagogues stand for a supposed right to exclude and exploit, always in defense of one hierarchy or another.

Beyond the obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking about this freedom to dominate because I have been reading “Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power” by the historian Jefferson Cowie. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize last year, is essentially a history of the freedom to dominate in the United States, told through the story of Barbour County, Ala., an unusually consequential place in the nation’s history.

I am just about done with the book, which is to say I am at the point where Cowie turns the focus to George Wallace, a native of Barbour County and one of the most repellent, politically gifted and, well, interesting Americans of the middle of the 20th century.

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.