The Books of My Life: The Poltics of Rage

If you want to understand how the Republican Party of today morphed into the Dixiecrats of yesteryear there is no better book you can read than Emory historian Dan Carter's The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). Carter's book, which is part biography and part history of post-World War II American politics, explores the role Alabama politician and former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace played in what Carter calls the Southernisation of American politics or what I call the dixiefornication of American politics.

Wallace, in the 1960s and 1970s, as Carter shows, used the politics of White rage and resentment (negative emotions are easy to manipulate) over integration, busing to achieve integration, federal government "tyranny", the "tyranny" of the federal courts (both of which were pushing integration at the time), high taxes, welfare freeloaders and cheats (a code word for Blacks), the lack of law and order (code words for dissidents, civil rights activists and Blacks protesting in the streets), along with the rhetoric of states rights (a code word for keeping your hands off of our Jim Crow and our local schools), the far too great expansion of the federal government and government spending (code word for welfare spending on Blacks), anti-communism, anti-counterculturalism, and anti-intellectualism to achieve political prominence and notoriety not only in his Deep South home but also in the American North and West in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to the appeal of these issues to Southern Whites, angry White Southern evangelicals (custodians of the lost cause living the myth of being poor poor persecuted Christians), angry suburban Whites, angry Catholic Ethnic Whites, and angry blue collar Whites.

Republican Richard Nixon and strategist Kevin Phillips would, of course, steal Wallace's thunder in order to appeal to the same White rageoholics Wallace did, helping, in the process, to create a new Republican Party that today is dominated by perhaps that most dixiefornicated of New Yorkers, President Donald Trump, who is, in many ways, channeling the ghost of George Wallace right down to his ties to the KKK, White Supremacists, and his use of manichean rhetoric to stir up his "saintly" supporters against the "demons" of the press and "liberal" protesters in his audience, who, like those at George Wallace political revivals, were also physically attacked. Sometimes, it seems, history runs in cycles. 

While I found the political history of the book more compelling than the biographical parts I still highly recommend Carter's excellent and insightful book. If you have an interest in the history of the Republican Party particularly in the post WWII period or a history of the dixiefornication of America, check it out.