Is Trump tapping into anxieties of white America?
Peter Grier
The presidential hopeful knew many American voters were angry. Some of his rivals preached calm. He didn’t. “We need some meanness,” he said at one point on the campaign trail. Confrontation at his rallies became a ritual. He spoke, the hecklers started, and he shouted back. Fistfights broke out in the aisles. Scores of police were necessary to restore order.
One Midwestern rally decayed into a chair-swinging melee. Bodyguards hustled the candidate off stage. As handcuffed protesters shuffled towards the exits, supporters sucker-punched them. Law enforcement did not intervene. Donald Trump, 2016? Nope. George Wallace, 1968. “One plainclothes policeman, using a pair of handcuffs as brass knuckles, cut the face of a heckler who shoved him,” said the Chicago Tribune in its account of the wild Wallace rally in Detroit on October 29 of that year.
Rabble-rousing has a long and complex history in United States politics. From the Know Nothing Party of the 1840s, through Ku Klux Klan violence in Reconstruction and into the tense era of Vietnam, ambitious politicians have at times directly appealed to the anxieties of a mainly white working class that the world they know is threatened, and is slipping from their grasp.
These appeals take many forms. Sometimes they’re about economic populism. Sometimes they’re about the perceived depredations of im- migrants. Sometimes they’re racist. Always there’s a whiff – and sometimes more than that – of violent resistance.
What’s Trump’s place in this continuum? That’s hard to say just yet. To this point he’s no George Wallace. This year isn’t anything like the late 1960s, when US politics and society itself seemed at the point of becoming unhinged.
But like Wallace, Trump blames his supporters’ outbursts on the other side. It’s not our fault, it’s them. You know, the others. The ones not like us.
“I get these massive crowds of people, and we’ll get protesters. And these protesters are honestly, they’re very bad people. In many cases, they’re professionals. Highly trained professionals,” Trump told the Washington Post editorial board during a meeting on March 21.
Trump tells supporters that their jobs have been stolen by illegal immigrants and stupid trade deals, and he’ll get them back. Under President Trump, we’ll wall ourselves off from the immigrants, beat China on trade, take the oil from Iraq we deserve, and force freeloading allies to pay for our protection.
If this is populism, it’s an aggressive strain. Left-leaning historian Rick Perlstein calls Trump’s general appeal “herrenvolk democracy.” It’s not conservatism at all. It’s big government, and big government programs, but only for the deserving.
They arose in reaction to immigration. The immigrants were Irish and German Catholics, though, not Hispanics from across the southern border.
And that brings us to 1968. Today’s US politics may seem dark, threatening, and polarised. But it was worse then, in the late ’60s. Casualties mounted in Vietnam as protests against the war split the country. Race riots erupted from Watts to Detroit. To the voters of what Richard Nixon labeled the “silent majority”, the nation seemed to be coming apart. By year’s end, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy would be gone, felled by assassins.
Alabama Governor George Wallace, avowed segregationist, colourful populist, and presidential aspirant, appealed to those workers’ fears. He threatened to shoot rioters and run his limousine over anti-war protestors. He opined that the racial unrest ripping around the US was “planned in Havana”.
In one 1967 speech Wallace said that the working people of America were fed up with Washington bureaucrats, pointy-headed professors, and “swaydo” (his pronunciation of “pseudo”) intellectual morons telling them how to live their lives.
And his supporters were violent. The October 29 riot at his Detroit rally at Cobo Hall was but the culmination. An earlier rally at Madison Square Garden in New York was kept under control only by the presence of 1,000 policemen.
Today’s Trump rallies are only a pale echo of that, at least so far. But the real estate magnate has also expressed some nostalgia for the “old days”. “We’re not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to [protesters] in a place like this? They would be carried out in a stretcher, folks. True,” Trump said at a Las Vegas rally in February.