Best Quote of the Week

While this week is exceedingly young, kudos to one of my favorite liberals, Nicholas Kristoff, NYT columnist, for one of the best quotes of the week:

If secular liberals can give up some of their snootiness, and if evangelicals can retire some of their sanctimony, then we all might succeed together in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity, like illiteracy, human trafficking and maternal mortality.

Wallace and the New GOP, Part II

Jonathan Rauch’s article on the Wallace and the New GOP prompted me to undertake some reverse engineering of the Wallace legacy.

 

As Rauch contends, Wallace foreshadowed Palin. Even more significant, he, more than any of his contemporaries, contributed to the environment in which 21^st century populist conservatism thrives.

 

Aside from creating a hospitable environment for modern conservative populism, Wallace accomplished something even more far-reaching: he administered the final coup de grace to the Vital Center, the pragmatic liberal political consensus the emerged after World War II.

 

Writing in what is arguably the best primer ever written on history of modern American politics, Why American Hates Politics, E.J. Dionne, identifies Wallace as one of three pivotal political leaders who benefited from the breakup of the Vital Center. The other two were George McGovern and Jimmy Carter.

McGovern and Wallace were especially successful not only because they benefited from this breakup but also because they imposed lasting stamps on the American landscape, Dionne says.

Wallace and McGovern were exceptionally important figures in our recent political history because they each gave form and leadership that transformed American politics. Wallace was the bridge between the old Democratic South and the new presidentially Republican South. McGovern came to represent the middle-class reformers who began to feel their power in the Democratic Party after Adlai Stevenson’s nomination in 1952.

Personally, I don’t think Dionne affords Wallace full credit. Granted, Wallace was one of several right-wing critics of the prevailing consensus. But while other self-identified conservatives, such as Goldwater, exposed the soft underbelly of pragmatic liberalism, Wallace succeeded in wrenching away one of this consensus’s most vital components: working class whites.

For example, as one of three contenders in the 1972 Maryland Democratic primary, Wallace secured half the vote by capitalizing on proposed and highly controversial school busing plan.

Ironically, Wallace’s near assassination by Arthur Bremer ultimately worked to the benefit Richard Nixon, who attracted most of the Wallace base. Dionne quotes a Yankelovich survey for the New York Times and Time magazine in the fall of 1972 revealing that among Nixon voters, nearly half of Southern blue-collar and almost a third of Northern workers preferred Wallace.

Wallace and the New GOP

I’m a native Alabamian. I knew the late George C. Wallace.  George Wallace was a governor of mine – not to mention one of the great oddities of Southern and American politics.

Oddities and ironies, I should say.  How’s this for irony: Wallace, widely regarded today as one of the founding fathers of the populist right, harbored deeply passionate Southern progressive views, dreaming one day of becoming a political leader in the tradition of his heroes, Franklin Roosevelt and  Carl Elliott.  He and his fellow University of Alabama law student, Frank Johnson, destined to become a legend in his own right, used to debate politics into the wee hours of the night, Wallace standing resolutely for the New Deal, Johnson defending the Republican values of limited government and free enterprise.

A young Wallace was among the paltry number of progressive Southern Democratic delegates who did not bolt with Dixiecrats following disagreement over the civil rights plank at the ’48 Democratic Convention. And as The National Journal’s Jonathan Rauch observes, Wallace, the Southern governor, never fully abandoned these progressive sentiments, even as he traveled the country as a presidential candidate beating the drums against intrusive federalism:

Wallace was not a libertarian. In Alabama, he expanded the state government and built the junior college system. He never presented a program to shrink the government in Washington. That never stopped him from attacking Big Government, at least on the federal level. He called for “freedom from unwarranted, unwise, and unwanted intrusion and oppression by the federal government” and said, “I think that what they ought to do is cut down on federal spending.” But he never put his money where his mouth was.

Rauch also raises another important point: that throughout history libertarianism has served as politically useful rhetoric but rarely as a strategy for governing after victory – a political reality of which the savvy Wallace never lost sight.

For Wallace, small-government rhetoric was a trope, not a workable agenda. The same is true of his Republican heirs today, who insist that spending cuts alone, without tax increases, will restore fiscal balance but who have not proposed anywhere near enough spending cuts, primarily because they can’t.