In 1968 Wallace took this spirit of victimisation into national politics. (Nichter differs from other historians in his insistence that Wallace’s campaign largely abandoned appeals to racism.) His candidacy tapped into a right-wing activist network that had flourished in the wake of Goldwater’s failed campaign and involved such fervent anti-communist organisations as the John Birch Society. But it also spoke to a new constituency: blue-collar workers and low-income service workers in Northern cities who were starting to lose the factory jobs that had brought them security in the postwar era. As Wallace put it, he spoke for the ‘man in the textile mill, [the] man in the steel mill, [the] barber, [the] beautician, the policeman on the beat’. ‘Yes, they’ve looked down their nose at you and me a long time. They’ve called us rednecks … Well, we’re going to show Mr Nixon and Mr Humphrey that there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country.’ Workers weren’t encouraged to unite against bosses but to rally against the ‘pseudo-intellectuals’, the ‘over-educated, ivory-tower folks with pointed heads’ who claimed to have the answers in Vietnam when in fact they couldn’t ‘park a bicycle straight’. Wallace wasn’t the only politician who adopted this populist register in the late 1960s. Mario Procaccino, the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor in 1969, coined the phrase ‘limousine liberal’ to describe the people Wallace was campaigning against, and Frank Rizzo governed Philadelphia in a similar way in the 1970s. But Wallace brought this language into national politics, showing that it was possible to build a campaign that united the white South with a disaffected core of previously Democratic voters in the North and Midwest.
Whatever chance Wallace had of getting enough votes to determine the course of the election vanished when his running mate, Curtis LeMay, a retired Air Force chief of staff, began to rail against the American ‘phobia’ of nuclear weapons, suggesting that the only thing preventing the US from victory in Vietnam was squeamishness. (In one speech, LeMay described the abundant natural beauty of the nuclear test sites in Bikini Atoll – who cared if a few land crabs on the beach were ‘hot’?) But the rhetoric of white working-class resentment and its targets – liberals, hippies, students, people on welfare – has never left American politics. Wallace’s quixotic campaign was co-opted by the right, most immediately in Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy’. In the decades since 1968, politicians from Pat Buchanan to Trump have borrowed from his script.