{"id":17135,"date":"2016-03-25T08:02:22","date_gmt":"2016-03-25T15:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/in-trump-echoes-of-george-wallace\/"},"modified":"2016-03-25T08:02:22","modified_gmt":"2016-03-25T15:02:22","slug":"in-trump-echoes-of-george-wallace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/in-trump-echoes-of-george-wallace\/","title":{"rendered":"In Trump, echoes of George Wallace?"},"content":{"rendered":"

ATLANTA \u2014 <\/strong>One presidential candidate pledged to \u201cStand up for America.\u201d Two generations later, another promises to \u201cMake America Great Again.\u201d Their common denominator: convincing certain Americans that their version of the United States is under threat.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump, leader for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, has never said he\u2019s following the playbook of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who achieved national stature on his promise of \u201csegregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever,\u201d then made four failed bids for the White House from 1964 to 1976.<\/p>\n

Instead, Trump invokes the anger of \u201cthe silent majority,\u201d a phrase he\u2019s resurrected from the era of Wallace and President Richard Nixon, who won in 1968 and 1972 in part by co-opting Wallace\u2019s racially charged populism.<\/p>\n

Trump detractors hear more than a faint echo of Wallace in Trump\u2019s anti-establishment mix of economic protectionism and blunt nativism, and they note that the brash billionaire, like Wallace, has drawn similar results in the campaign: tense rallies that often involve violent clashes among protesters, police and the candidate\u2019s supporters.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump is taking his campaign straight to the haters, and he\u2019s gotten the roots of that old Wallace crowd,\u201d says Joe Reed, a black Democratic Party broker in Alabama who came to know the four-term governor toward the end of his life, when he had abandoned his segregationist positions, long after a would-be assassin left him paralyzed.<\/p>\n

The comparison offends Trump backers.<\/p>\n

\u201cGeorge Wallace was a racist,\u201d said Debbie Dooley, a national tea party leader. \u201cIt\u2019s totally ridiculous for anybody to think the same about Donald Trump.\u201d She argues Trump\u2019s independence from \u201cthe money that controls Washington, D.C.\u201d outweigh his caustic rhetoric on immigration, Muslims and the protesters \u2014 many of them young and black \u2014 who interrupt his rallies.<\/p>\n

\u201cDonald Trump is not preaching hate,\u201d Dooley said. \u201cHe\u2019s standing up for the American workers and the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump offers his outsized personality as an all-purpose antidote to a country that is \u201cfalling apart\u201d and \u201cnever wins anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

The overwhelmingly white throngs at Trump rallies roar at his mention of a border wall and heartily approve his call to stop all non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States. Supporters cheer his promises to protect gun rights and share his lament that Christianity is under attack. They applaud his threats of punitive tariffs on imports from countries \u201ckilling us on trade.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wallace, meanwhile, fueled his strongest campaigns in 1968 and 1972 with a wide-ranging critique of a society in decline. He modified the overtly racist language he used in his Alabama campaigns, fashioning himself instead as a \u201cstates\u2019 rights\u201d conservative. He complained of rising crime and a \u201csick Supreme Court\u201d that outlawed compulsory school prayer and allowed pornography.<\/p>\n

Wallace, political historian Dan T. Carter said, \u201chad all these ways of getting across what he meant\u201d without explicitly mentioning race or class. \u201cHe said \u2018inner-city thugs,\u2019 and everybody knew he was talking about young black men in the cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tom Turnipseed, who managed Wallace\u2019s 1968 campaign and became a civil rights activist, assigned the same motivation to Trump and Wallace. \u201cFear,\u201d he told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can scare folks with that line that the Mexicans are coming because everyday working people … see Mexicans in the labor market and it hurts their wages \u2014 they think of it that way, at least,\u201d Turnipseed said. \u201cGovernor Wallace, you know, did the same with African-Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his book \u201cThe Politics of Rage,\u201d Carter identifies Wallace and his play for working-class white votes as the model for the \u201cSouthern strategy\u201d that Nixon and Ronald Reagan would use in four winning elections.<\/p>\n

Nixon wrote in his memoirs of having to navigate Wallace so he would not \u201cdraw a large number of conservative votes from me.\u201d Nixon protected his right flank by criticizing court-ordered busing of schoolchildren to accomplish integration, vowing to impose \u201claw and order\u201d and declaring the \u201cWar on Drugs,\u201d which an aide later described as a targeting of \u201chippies\u201d and blacks.<\/p>\n

Trump is the latest heir of all this, Carter said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you hear Trump supporters say he \u2018tells like it is\u2019 or \u2018he\u2019s not politically correct,\u2019\u201d Carter said, \u201cwhat they\u2019re really saying, many of them, is … \u2018I love it, because it\u2019s what I believe, too.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Protesters, meanwhile, become evidence of the national decay that only the candidate\u2019s tough leadership can reverse.<\/p>\n

When activists interrupted his rally at Madison Square Garden in 1968, Wallace asked why Democratic and Republican leaders \u201ckowtow to these anarchists.\u201d He added, \u201cWe don\u2019t have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, first one of \u2018em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that\u2019s all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has pined for \u201cthe old days\u201d when such \u201canimals\u201d would be \u201ccarried out on a stretcher, folks.\u201d He orders security to \u201cget \u2018em the hell outta here\u201d and said of one protester, \u201cI\u2019d like to punch him in the face.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reed acknowledged there are \u201cworking white folks who are mad\u201d but says Trump, like Wallace, has them \u201cturning their arrows at the wrong folks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump denies he is playing to racism or xenophobia. His supporters \u201caren\u2019t angry people,\u201d he says, just frustrated \u201cabout the way the country is being run.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are we looking for, OK, all of us?\u201d Trump asked after declaring that families, jobs, homes and health care face existential threats. \u201cWe\u2019re looking for security. We\u2019re looking for safety. We\u2019re looking for family, and taking care of our family, right?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ATLANTA \u2014 One presidential candidate pledged to \u201cStand up for America.\u201d Two generations later, another promises to \u201cMake America Great Again.\u201d Their common denominator: convincing certain Americans that their version of the United States is under threat. Donald Trump, leader for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, has never said he\u2019s following the playbook of Alabama […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":17136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-17135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17135"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=17135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}