From: julianlzb87@gmail.com   
      
   No US politician has shown such scorn for democracy, yet Trump’s brand   
   of populism echoes the rhetoric of George Wallace and has parallels with   
   Nixon and Reagan   
      
      
   One day in the spring of 1964, George Wallace came to Milwaukee’s Serb   
   Memorial Hall. Best known for his ferocious defence of racial   
   segregation, the pugnacious governor was a long way from home.   
   Milwaukee, the largest city in the midwestern state of Wisconsin, is   
   almost 1,000 miles from Wallace’s natural habitat, the sweltering cotton   
   fields of Alabama.   
      
   So to prepare for his primary challenge to President Lyndon Johnson,   
   Wallace’s aides had painted an American flag over the usual Confederate   
   flag on his gubernatorial plane, and had changed his slogan from “Stand   
   up for Alabama” to “Stand up for America”.   
      
   But there was no disguising his drawl, the unmistakeable sign of an   
   outsider from the very furthest reaches of the Deep South. And as the   
   little man with the slicked back hair stepped up to address a crowd of   
   largely Polish-American voters — mechanics, repairmen, brewers,   
   toolmakers — none of the watching reporters expected to see a great   
   meeting of minds.   
      
   What followed was one of the great unheralded landmarks in American   
   political history. To the reporters’ surprise, Wallace barely mentioned   
   his favourite subject, race. Instead, he talked about the swamp of   
   Washington, the tyranny of unelected judges, the cancer of elitist   
   arrogance, the scourge of federal interference.   
      
   Ordinary working Americans, he said, had been betrayed by “pointy-headed   
   professors”, “bearded beatnik bureaucrats”, “federal judges playing   
   God”   
   and the “liberal sob sisters” of the mainstream media. He promised to   
   clean out the communists in the State Department, and to scrap all laws   
   favouring minorities, criminals and freeloaders. And whenever he paused   
   for breath, the audience rose to cheer him to the rafters. One reporter   
   counted 34 ovations in just 40 minutes. It was a performance of which   
   Donald Trump would have been proud — and that, of course, tells its own   
   story.   
      
   Wallace never won the presidency; indeed, he didn’t even win the   
   Wisconsin primary. But he was far more successful than anybody had   
   anticipated, and as an independent presidential candidate four years   
   later he won five states and ten million votes. Liberal commentators   
   never knew how to handle him. Some, appalled by his rambling,   
   disconnected but electrically aggressive speeches, saw him as America’s   
   Hitler, while protesters tried to disrupt his rallies by shouting “Sieg   
   Heil!” Others, laughing at his shiny suits, his greasy hair, his air of   
   cheapness and vulgarity, treated him as a fraudster, a shyster, a   
   political conman.   
      
   But it took the novelist Norman Mailer, a waspishly astute observer of   
   American politics, to recognise that Wallace might not be an aberration   
   or a freak, but the beginning of something profound. The voters of   
   suburban America, he wrote in 1968, might not be ready for Wallace. But   
   they were “waiting for a Super Wallace”. They discovered him in 2016,   
   and this week they found him once again.   
      
   Donald Trump’s supporters and detractors alike often claim that the   
   first man to regain the presidency since Grover Cleveland in 1892 is a   
   unique phenomenon, untethered by the laws of political physics. And so   
   the comparison with the race-baiting governor of one of the bastions of   
   the old Confederacy might sound offensive to some Donald Trump   
   supporters. But the rhetorical and aesthetic parallels — the long lists   
   of enemies, the indictment of Washington bureaucrats, even the hair and   
   suits derided by East Coast critics — are too striking to ignore.   
      
   The comparison with Wallace is a reminder that Trump and Trumpism are   
   deeply rooted in American political history. His critics think of him as   
   abnormal, a break from the pattern, and in one or two respects they are   
   right.   
      
   No president in US history has ever displayed such scorn for the   
   conventions of democracy or such contempt for the basic decencies of   
   political life. But Trump’s anti-Washington populism would have been   
   instantly recognisable to the men and women in the Serb Memorial Hall in   
   1964.   
      
   Even his style, such a contrast with the polished oratory of Barack   
   Obama or the vanilla pieties of Kamala Harris, is nothing new. In his   
   uncannily prescient biography of Wallace, The Politics of Rage, the   
   historian Dan Carter writes that he was brilliant at tapping “his   
   audiences’ deepest fears and passions … in a language and style they   
   could understand.   
      
   “On paper his speeches were stunningly disconnected, at times   
   incoherent, and always repetitious. But Wallace’s followers revelled in   
   the performance; they never tired of hearing the same lines again and   
   again.”   
      
   And that in turn drew on a long tradition of American political oratory,   
   not least in Wallace’s native Deep South. For as Carter notes, Wallace   
   was inspired by a political mentor called (inevitably) Big Jim Folsom,   
   whose own speeches were a blend of “exaggeration, hyperbole, ridicule   
   and a kind of country sarcasm that mocked his enemies”.   
      
   So when Trump’s critics claim, as they so often do, that “this is not   
   America”, they are quite wrong. Everything about him, from his persona   
   and rhetoric to the hopes and hatreds of his supporters, is very   
   American indeed.   
      
   None of this should be surprising. A populist thread has run through   
   American democracy since the very beginning, from the slaveowner Thomas   
   Jefferson’s idealised republic of yeoman farmers to the scandal-plagued,   
   Indian-slaughtering Andrew Jackson’s appeal to the muscular nationalism   
   of the “common man”.   
      
   Suspicion of government is as old as the United States: anybody who   
   thinks that Elon Musk invented conspiracy theories should take a long   
   look the Declaration of Independence, with its luridly exaggerated   
   attacks on the supposedly tyrannical George III. And although American   
   populism and paranoia have a flavour all of their own, they are hardly   
   unique. All nations have their own pathologies, even our own.   
      
   Yet populism and paranoia are not the whole story, and we should know   
   better than to dismiss Trump as a fascist in a comically ill-cut suit.   
   Demagogic abuse and aggressive nativism have always been central   
   elements of his repertoire. Defenders who deny his dark side are just as   
   deluded as critics who see him as Hitler reincarnated. But when you dig   
   into the data of this second and most remarkable victory, a complicated   
   picture emerges.   
      
      
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