At the height of the 1968 presidential campaign, Douglas Kiker, a reporter for NBC, noted that George Wallace’s third-party effort was catching fire. Kiker, a Southerner, noted that the Alabama Governor was gaining traction in the North using racism as the engine of his effort. Kiker stated, “All is as if somewhere sometime a while back George Wallace had been awakened by a white blinding vision: they all hate black people, all of them, Great God! That’s it! They’re all Southern! The whole United States is Southern”.

This was September of 1968, when Wallace, whose most famous acts had been to stand in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama and to commit other brutalities against civil rights workers, stood at 23% in the polls. One New Yorker was succinct: “Governor Wallace is the only one outside of God who can get us out of this mess and bring our Glorious Country back where it was before the Roosevelt inauguration”. As a Southern observer put it, “the galoots” were “loose”.

Wallace’s message was not so different than Donald Trump’s; he was going to make America great again by turning back the clock. He appealed to fear, not hope, and shaded it with a populist tinge. Trump uses anti-immigrant rhetoric, and, as Wallace, disguises it on a platform of “law and order”. In the end, Wallace lost support to Richard Nixon, who used the “law and order” appeal to cut into Wallace’s vote. Hubert Humphrey exposed some unpleasant facts about Alabama’s record in the state economy. In the end, Humphrey and Nixon went down to the wire.

Trump’s MAGA achieved what Wallace failed to achieve. He shared Wallace’s dislike of foreign aid and mirrored the Governor’s dislike of Federal judges. Like Wallace, Trump fudged the intervention question by simply rejecting “forever wars”. Wallace, who never held the power Trump holds, predicted the future. Resentment drove Wallace’s effort, as it did Trump’s; as with Trump, Wallace had a biting wit, and, in a special twist, both depended on rallies.

The problem with Trump’s effort is that it is becoming dated. Unlike Wallace, he openly embraces the Mar-a-Lago set. Wallace attacked these as “got rock folks.” But his populism was no less contrived than Trump’s.

The appeal was to nostalgia and fantasy. They created an idyllic view of small-town America that bordered on the pristine. In some cases, they rightfully resented the snobbery of elites, but did not correctly observe that the GOP had more of them than the Democrats ever did. Trump, who is an elitist, though he claims he is not, offers formulas that favor the mega-rich.

Trump, ironic as it is, undid his coalition, as Lyndon Johnson did, embarking on a war he had pledged he would not. Neither LBJ nor DJT particularly likes to explain such decisions. If Vietnam proved a barrier to LBJ’s “Great Society,” perhaps the Iran action might thwart Trump’s “golden age.”