He's The George Wallace Of The 21st Century

Cynthia Tucker

July 9, 2018 4:30 am

In “The Politics of Rage,” his brilliant 1995 analysis of George Wallace’s visceral appeal, scholar Dan T. Carter notes that the infamous Alabama segregationist had an uncanny ability to home in on the fears and resentments of working-class whites who were angered by cultural change. And that exceptional talent not only propelled Wallace’s remarkable political career, but it also reshaped America’s conservative movement, Carter explained.

“In speech after speech, Wallace knit together the strands of racism with those of a deeply rooted xenophobic ‘plain folk’ cultural outlook which equated social change with moral corruption. The creators of public policy — the elite — were out of touch with hardworking taxpayers who footed the bill for their visionary social engineering at home and weak-minded defense of American interests abroad,” Carter wrote.

Sound familiar? President Donald J. Trump has picked up the Alabama governor’s playbook, using a crude and unscripted rhetoric full of racism and xenophobia to tap into the barely submerged prejudices, misplaced rage and assumptions of privilege that animate a significant portion of the nation’s white working class.

Trump may not yell, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” but his demagoguery is hardly subtle. The president provokes his base with recitations of atrocities supposedly visited upon innocent Americans by members of MS-13, a Latino criminal gang. He relays made-up crime statistics to portray the nation’s predominantly black and brown urban areas as sump holes of predation. He claims that the southern border is being overrun by murderers, rapists and terrorists.

Never mind that much of what the president says is not true. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, violent crime in the United States is at a historical low, down to the rate of the 1960s. And immigrants are responsible for very few of the crimes that are committed; statistics show they are less likely to break the law than the native-born population. (Towns and cities with a high influx of immigrants have lower crime rates than the rest of the country, it turns out.)

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