The Populist Explosion. John B. Judis

opposed busing—which became a major issue after a 1971 Supreme Court order upheld it as a means to achieve desegregation—because it was breaking up working-class neighborhoods, and he attacked the white liberals who promoted it as hypocrites who refused to subject their children to what they insisted that working- and middle-class kids be subjected to. “They are building a bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals fleeing to Virginia,” he declared.

      Wallace was not, however, a political conservative. On domestic issues that didn’t directly touch on race, Wallace ran as a New Deal Democrat. In his campaign brochure in 1968, he boasted that in Alabama, he had increased spending on education, welfare, roads, and agriculture. When he was asked in 1967 who he would appoint to his cabinet if he were elected, he said he would consider either AFL-CIO head George Meany or Leonard Woodcock, the head of the United Auto Workers. He also drew a line between the people and the very rich and powerful. Campaigning in Florida, he said, “We’re sick and tired of the average citizen being taxed to death while these multibillionaires like the Rockefellers and the Fords and the Mellons and Carnegies go without paying taxes.” Wallace, like Long, was often called fascist, but he was a rightwing populist in the tradition of the post-1896 Tom Watson. When protesters accused him of being a fascist, Wallace, who served in World War II, responded, “I was killing fascists when you punks were in diapers.”

      Like Wallace, his supporters were a mix of left and right in their convictions. In 1976, sociologist Donald Warren published a study of what he called “middle American radicals,” or MARs. On the basis of extensive surveys conducted in 1971–72 and 1975, Warren defined a distinct political group that was neither left nor right, liberal nor conservative. MARs “feel the middle class has been seriously neglected,” Warren wrote. They see “government as favoring both the rich and poor simultaneously.”

      Warren’s MARs held conservative positions on poverty and racial issues. They rejected racial busing and welfare agencies as examples of “the rich [giving] in to the demands of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill.” They disliked the national government, but they also thought corporations “have too much power” and were “too big.” They favored many liberal programs. They wanted government to guarantee jobs to everyone. They supported price (but not wage) control, Medicare, some kind of national health insurance, federal aid to education, and Social Security.

      Warren found that MARs represented about a quarter of the electorate. They were on average more male than female; they had a high school but not a college education; their income fell in the middle, or slightly below; they had skilled or semi-skilled blue-collar jobs, or clerical or sales white-collar work. When Warren grouped by income and education the other groups he surveyed into “lower income,” “average middles,” “high education middles,” and “affluents,” he found that of all of them the MARs were most likely to contemplate voting for George Wallace in 1972. A Gallup study of the demographics of the 1968 Wallace vote found his constituency to be identical to that of Warren’s MARs.

      In other words, Wallace’s base was among voters who saw themselves as “middle class”—the American equivalent of “the people”—and who saw themselves locked in conflict with those below and above. Like Wallace, they remained New Deal liberals in many of their views, but not on matters that bore on race or law and order. In these cases, they adamantly rejected the welfare and busing and affirmative action policies that 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern and many liberal Democrats favored. They had begun the political journey from Democrat to Independent to Republican that would finally conclude in the 1994 congressional elections.

      Wallace, like Long, was a movement unto himself. When he was shot and forced to drop out of the presidential campaign, it ended his attempt to transform American politics. He would run again in 1976 but would be eclipsed by another Southern politician, Jimmy Carter. Attempts by conservatives to retain his American Independent Party flopped. He would serve as governor again, and would repudiate and apologize for his own opposition to racial integration. He would end his career much as he began—as a New Deal Democrat. But Wallace and his followers had already had a profound influence on the two-party system.

      Wallace’s campaigns were the opening wedge in the realignment of the parties in the South. The Republicans would subsequently accommodate Wallace’s positions on big government, welfare, busing, and affirmative action. And Nixon had already begun to do that. As Kevin Phillips understood in his prescient 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, Wallace’s votes would migrate to the Republican Party. In 1972, Nixon’s percentage vote against McGovern closely resembled the total of Nixon and Wallace’s votes in 1968 in 45 of 50 states. In 14 states, the percentages were almost identical.

      The Democratic and Republican coalitions that would emerge after Wallace’s 1968 run and McGovern’s 1972 campaign would be significantly different from the coalitions of the New Deal era. From 1932 through 1960, the two parties’ support could roughly be arrayed in a pyramid with income and education moving upward. Democrats, as the party of the “common man,” took up most of the bottom two-thirds. That allowed the Democrats to win most of the elections.

      In 1972, many white voters in the lower and middle segments of the pyramid would begin shifting to the Republicans, while many professionals—from nurses and teachers to engineers and architects—who had been loyal Republicans, but who had been touched by the new left movements of the ’60s, and had expected but not found autonomy and satisfaction in their work, would begin voting for the Democrats. They became critics of unregulated capitalism, and their descendants would provide much of Bernie Sanders’s support. The Democrats began building an odd coalition of the minority poor with upper-middle-class whites. There would no longer be a clear demarcation between the parties on income and education.

      The transformation of the coalitions would be delayed by the Watergate scandal and wouldn’t fully come to fruition until 1980 or even 1994, when the Republicans would win both houses of Congress. Wallace’s populist candidacies, far more than Goldwater’s, set this process in motion. His campaigns would lead to Republicans adopting Wallace’s stand on government and state’s rights, along with an opportunistic imitation of his own populist anti-elitist politics (directed at “Washington”). But then Pat Buchanan in his 1992 and 1996 campaigns and Trump in his 2016 campaign would draw on the unruly populism of Wallace’s middle American radicals and would mobilize it against the Republicans’ more traditional supporters.