Trump rhetoric echoes 1968 George Wallace campaign
Pity the poor white man; he just can’t catch a break in this country.
If that strikes you as an unpromising theme for a presidential campaign in 2020, you must not be part of President Donald Trump’s cult. Seemingly running as the reincarnation of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Trump travels from sea to shining sea appealing to the resentment and self-pity of those whose ancestors lost the Civil War.
Even if they had no such ancestors. Not every white person who embraces Trump’s dark intimations of cultural warfare is descended from slave owners or rebel soldiers. Unrepentant racists are a dying breed across the South. Indeed, you’d think that Mississippi’s decision to remove Confederate imagery from its state flag would give even Trump pause. Not to mention NASCAR’s banning of the Confederate flag. Bad for business, you see. After all, who defends slavery anymore?
Actually, it’s more the George Wallace of 1968 that Trump appears to be imitating. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin digs up an apposite quote from that year: “The pseudo-intellectuals and the theoreticians and some professors and some newspaper editors and some judges and some preachers,” the Alabama governor said, “have looked down their nose long enough at the average man on the street.”
Everybody looks down on them, see. They are the real victims. And you know what? It’s not totally imaginary. As the husband of an Arkansas girl in academic New England back then, we met with a degree of prejudice. She got used to being patronized as a dumb bigot. New Englanders would ask her questions at the general store just to hear her talk. Then there was the colleague who sympathized with my own imagined discomfort as an “aristocratic Southerner” with minority students. I’m a person of Irish peasant descent from industrial Elizabeth, N.J. Aristocratic? Hardly. I thought a professor who couldn’t spot an Irishman in Massachusetts, of all places, didn’t need to be lecturing anybody about diversity. But these were minor episodes. Caricature is inevitable when cultures collide. Nevertheless, we did take the precaution of leaving.
Less amusing are the growing number of farcical but dangerous confrontations provoked by Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric as amplified on social media. Even as the president tweets out messages about white power and delivers ominous speeches about left-wing mobs, online provocateurs are doing their best to inflame the gullible.
During recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Little Rock, Ark., cops seemingly tricked by Facebook postings went around telling people that mobs of antifa activists were holed up in a downtown hotel conspiring to loot and burn wealthy suburbs. Needless to say, nothing happened.
Similar hoaxes have provoked armed vigilantes across the country into taking to the streets to defend their communities against the largely mythical antifa. (Which is not to say there aren’t fools on the left, doing their utmost to provoke a voter backlash against their ostensible cause. Joe Biden can’t proclaim his hostility toward arsonists and looters strongly enough.)
The Washington Post detailed a scary episode at Gettysburg National Cemetery on July 4. Spurred by Facebook postings on a phony antifa page that promised an Independence Day flagburning festival at the park, a veritable army of right-wing zealots showed up locked and loaded to protect Civil War monuments there. Yet nobody showed up to incinerate any flags.
Post reporters searched for the phony antifa site’s author but came up empty. The whole thing was a malicious hoax cleverly designed to trick foolhardy armed men into pointing guns at their imagined enemies.
Armed men were goaded into a frenzy by Trump, whose only hope of being returned to office lies in setting Americans at one another’s throats.
One day before too long, I fear, those guns are going to go off.