The candidate for president of the United States of America exuded a cocky energy. He presided over rallies that dangled on the edge of violence. He attracted white working-class people who reveled in how he defied the norms for public behavior. He encouraged an “us-against-them” mentality.
The candidate for president of the United States of America blasted liberal elites and snobby media types. He said racist stuff and then insisted that he was not racist. He welcomed big contributions from the anti-government “Radical Right,” while winning grassroots support of common people who saw themselves as part of a movement.
The candidate for president of the United States of America promised that he would deliver order, when in fact he fomented chaos. He cast himself as a champion of religion, despite his own dubious morality, and an exemplar of patriotism, though he was quite self-serving. He claimed that he, and only he, could deliver the nation back to its cherished ideals from the past. And as Election Day neared, he charged that a conspiracy would rig the results against him.
This candidate sounds familiar to any sentient human who has lived through the past decade, because Donald Trump has dominated the media coverage of recent American presidential elections, whether in victory or defeat. But this candidate first surfaced over a half-century ago, in the shape of former Alabama governor George Wallace.
During the presidential election of 1968, Wallace did more than provide a template for Trump. Wallace embodied a strain of populist conservatism that reshaped the nation’s politics. Though he was a Democrat as Alabama governor and ran for president as an independent, his style had its biggest impact on the Republicans. He released new forces that shaped the G.O.P. message. Trump gathered those forces under his banner, changing the identity of the Republican Party.
Wallace channeled a political tradition with deep roots in American history. Populism typically employs a charismatic leader who claims to represent common, hardworking people against the elites and their repressive institutions. In an earlier period, it was the language of the left, exemplified by figures such as William Jennings Bryan, the “Great Commoner” who led the agrarian wing of the Democratic Party, railing against railroad barons and the gold standard.
In the second half of the 20th century, some conservatives grabbed the populist banner, as evidenced by the anticommunist witch hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Yet for most of the 1950s and 1960s, a “liberal consensus” reigned among most Democrats and Republicans. They shared a general agenda of promoting prosperity, enacting gradual domestic reforms, and combating communism. Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs of the 1960s—including legislation on civil rights, anti-poverty, immigration, education, and health care—represented liberalism at its height.
By the late 1960s, however, that consensus fractured. American escalation in the Vietnam War invited widespread discontent, while inner-city violence, the rise of Black Power politics, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. drained the will for remedial legislation on race. The clashes between Chicago police and antiwar activists at the Democratic National Convention highlighted the national divides.
In 1968, Wallace exploited the swelling backlash, stoking his campaign fires with popular rage and resentment against hippie radicals, Black Power activists, and urban rioters. Significantly, he blamed their elite enablers: newspaper editors, television producers, college professors, government bureaucrats. “They don’t ask the cab drivers anymore,” he thundered. “They ask some fellow writing guidelines – some fellow with a pointed head who can’t even park a bicycle straight.”
The politics of race had driven Wallace’s career. He had once been an acolyte of “Big Jim” Folsom, the gregarious populist governor of Alabama who advocated liberal programs and racial moderation. But Wallace lost the governor’s race in 1958 after his opponent railed longer and harder against the civil rights movement. He learned his lesson, becoming a racial demagogue. When he took office in 1963, he famously declared “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”
That message had national appeal. In three Democratic primaries in 1964, Wallace won big chunks of votes from white, working-class people who resented the racial transformations in their midst.
In 1968, Wallace became the most influential third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt ran on the “Bull Moose” Party ticket in 1912. Wallace’s grassroots organizers got his name on the ballot of all fifty states, while he kept moving from rally to rally, stirring audiences by whetting their sense of alienation, demanding states’ rights, advocating the violent suppression of radical troublemakers, and upholding blue-collar whites as the upholders of American democracy. His campaign slogan, “Stand Up for America,” hearkened to a lost past that was worth the fight.
Wallace’s poll numbers surged as the Democratic Party weathered blow after blow, from Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination to the Chicago convention violence to the division over Vietnam, which nominee Hubert Humphrey failed to heal. By September, it appeared Wallace might keep either party from winning a majority in the Electoral College, which would turn the election to the House of Representatives.
Wallace ultimately won five Deep South states, though his campaign fizzled. His vice-presidential choice, General Curtis LeMay, was a disaster, while union leaders launched a major effort to keep their members loyal to the Democrats. As the campaign continued, he accused the political establishment and “Eastern money interest crowd” of falsifying the polls. “They are trying to rig an election,” he stated, playing on people’s fears of elite conspiracy.
In the meantime, Wallace compelled Richard Nixon to keep shifting to the right. Nixon wanted to co-opt the Wallace movement. That fall the Republican nominee called for “law and order,” appealed to the patriotic and class-conscious voters whom he would call the “silent majority,” and picked Spiro Agnew for vice president so that he could serve as a right-wing attack dog.
Republicans had long championed a traditional conservatism: limited government, economic growth, and a staunch foreign policy. That G.O.P. made room for moderates seeking reforms, in the vein of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. But after Wallace’s campaign and Nixon’s election, the party increasingly tied its identity to “gut-level” issues that appealed to cultural conservatives: opposition to abortion, opposition to busing programs for racial integration, opposition to gay rights, opposition to gun control, opposition to feminist politics, opposition to affirmative action programs.
“The whole secret to politics,” wrote Kevin Phillips in the 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority, “is knowing who hates who.” Following that formula, the Republicans found a new base of support. If someone considered voting for George Wallace in 1968, they had probably voted Democrat in the past, and they would probably vote Republican in the future.
In the ensuing decades, the Republican Party grew more uniformly conservative with Ronald Reagan forging a New Right coalition that united anticommunist hard-liners, free-market advocates, evangelical Christians, and working-class whites. By the time centrist Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama occupied the Oval Office, the G.O.P. accommodated more confrontational figures, from Newt Gingrich to Tea Party Republicans, who practiced populist politics while playing on conservative resentment.
Not until Donald Trump, however, did a candidate exploit the George Wallace playbook all the way into the White House. His campaigns in 2016, 2020, and 2024 have all centered around the politics of grievance. In his own theatrical way, he invites confrontations and launches accusations. His familiar phrases—from “American carnage” to “I, alone, can fix it” to “Make America Great Again”— employ the language of conservative populism. That style, revolving around Trump’s personality, dominates the modern Republican Party.
Donald Trump is George Wallace’s political descendant, a child tutored in the politics of rage.
