Their thesis rests on the fact that postwar economic development led to increased suburbanization in the South. 2 A group of younger scholars challenged Carter’s race-based approach, pointing out the similarities between racial sentiments in the North and South and thus deconstructing the idea of southern exceptionalism.

Carter made this argument most explicitly in his slim volume From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, in which he draws a direct line between Wallace’s “politics of anger” and the Republican agenda of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House between 19. Republicans started accommodating segregationist white southerners once their old party, the Democrats, gave in to demands of the civil rights movement. Wallace’s foremost biographer, Dan Carter, connects the Alabama governor’s race baiting with the racialized program of the GOP. Shafer and Richard Johnston, The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan (.)ĢGeorge Wallace’s impact on Republican politics has been a topic of debate amongst historians.

Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Prince (.) Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution (.) But with Donald Trump in the White House, it is hard to deny how a Wallaceite agenda has increasingly determined the course of the Republican Party. 1 Republicans appropriated, fine-tuned, and whitewashed his message in the following decades, hoping that people would eventually forget one of their main sources of inspiration. His rhetoric about immigrants (“bad hombres” and “rapists”), women (“grab them by the pussy”), and Washington politics (“drain the swamp”) harken back to the ambitions of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama who ran for the presidency in 1968. But beneath the thin veneer of this suburban American Dream, a much darker vision lurked: a hyper-masculine and racist vision finally exposed by the presidency of Donald Trump. This message was partly based on the idea of middle-class respectability.

Since the 1960s, the GOP crafted a political message catering to the conservative white vote set loose by the civil rights revolution. The rise to power of Trump – or more specifically, his political style – had been long in the making, despite the disbelief that gripped the country after Election Day.

The Republican establishment shuddered during the primaries, but then quickly fell in line behind its new leader. 1 “From Mexican Rapists to Bad Hombres, the Trump Campaign in Two Moments,” Washington Post, October (.)ġFew had foreseen it: Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election.

Hubert Humphrey by Carl Solberg