“Just wow,” Peggy and Mark Kennedy said to each other last week in Montgomery, Ala. On the TV, Roy Moore had just pulled a little pistol from a pocket of his cowboy costume to show his love for the Second Amendment. The next night he won the Republican nomination in the race to be their next senator.
Peggy, née Wallace, braced for a new round of interviews, having often been asked during the presidential campaign to compare Donald Trump with her father, the segregationist governor George C. Wallace. “But my daddy was qualified” for office, she would say, long since a supporter of Barack Obama.
She and Mr. Kennedy, a predecessor of Mr. Moore on the state Supreme Court, represent one current of Alabama history — a slice of the population yearning against the “fear and anger and hate” that Ms. Kennedy says her father exploited, and ultimately repented of. An irony of Southern history is the pride we take in the progress we tried so hard to thwart, whether it’s to cheer the Crimson Tide’s star-quarterback-who-happens-to-be-black, Jalen Hurts, or to give awards to native-born civil rights leaders like John Lewis, to whom Wallace famously apologized for the Selma bridge beating.
Partly this pride is a self-preservation mechanism of the Chamber of Commerce, which in Wallace’s heyday cringed at the uncouth antics of his largely rural supporters and ultimately joined the civil rights movement’s call for desegregation. So what’s remarkable today is the degree to which the classic Republican establishment has been captured by those mutant politicians — like Mr. Trump and Mr. Moore — recombinantly engineered by the party’s social Darwinist policies and id-emotion demagogy.
The Republican Party has long preyed on the shame of dispossessed white voters. But that shame — over “being viewed as second-class citizens,” Mr. Kennedy said — has converted into a defiance that the party doesn’t yet seem to grasp.
“Populism” has become a convenient shorthand for the nihilistic backlash, and the term has come to invoke a collection of largely irrational cultural tropes. But this doesn’t do justice to the critique of capitalism at the heart of the insurgency.
Original, post-Reconstruction populism was the crucible in which the elite deformed the have-nots’ economic urgency into racial anxiety. Alabama yeomen had returned from the Civil War to face a sea change in agriculture, with those formerly independent farmers joining former slaves in peonage to the large landholders. By the 1880s, under the Farmers Alliance, they were mounting a struggle of what one member called “organized labor against legalized robbery.” In 1892 they seceded from the Democratic Party. Strikingly, the new People’s Party, or Populists, included former slaves.
Realizing they had a revolution on their hands, the Democratic Party’s wealthy ex-Confederates and newly arrived Northern industrialists swiftly put this cross-racial revolt down. They cut off credit to Populist activists and expelled them from their churches; lynchings spiked. They also patented the timeless rejoinders to “class warfare,” calling the Populists a “communistic ring” and, crucially, as one Alabama publication put it, “nigger lovers and nigger huggers.”
The power of racial shame ensured that this thwarted biracial uprising would be a fluke of history. When the white have-nots revolted in successive decades, they appropriated the elite’s racist shibboleths — and took them so much further than the haves ever intended. In 1926 they sent Hugo Black, the candidate of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, to the Senate, where he became an architect of the New Deal (he later became a staunch civil libertarian on the Supreme Court).
And even when the elites were in charge of the racism, they could not always control the monster white supremacy they had created. In Birmingham, the fire hoses and police dogs of Eugene Connor, known as Bull, a city commissioner installed by the “Big Mules,” not only hastened the end of legal segregation but also made his city kryptonite for economic development.
The axiom of unintended consequences is the same today, and explains why populism remains ideologically incoherent: Caught up in feel-good spasms of nativism, the base is willing to overlook the Trump administration’s elite, kleptocratic culture. And the tax-cut-hungry Republican establishment keeps sowing the whirlwind, under the assumption that, in Mr. Kennedy’s words, its base “would rather be poor than not be proud.” Though the party — and Mr. Trump — backed Mr. Moore’s button-down runoff opponent, Luther Strange, it has shown no hesitation in pivoting to the winner.
But the Alabama psyche is complex, and Mr. Trump may have misread it at the now legendary rally in Huntsville where he tore into knee-taking black N.F.L. players — many of whom come out of Alabama football programs and therefore, Mr. Kennedy dryly observed, “are family.” Not surprisingly, it is in the biracial character of modern football that Alabamians feel comfortable expressing their redemptive impulses, so much so that Mr. Trump received a mild rebuke from the state’s spiritual leader, the Alabama football coach Nick Saban.
Also important to that redemption narrative is the South’s belated prosecution of civil rights era crimes, and one of its major protagonists is Doug Jones, Mr. Moore’s Democratic opponent for the Dec. 12 special election. As the United States attorney for North Alabama under Bill Clinton, Mr. Jones brought murder charges against the last two living suspects in Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which killed four black girls in 1963. (I have been friends with Mr. Jones since covering the two trials, in 2001 and 2002, at which the two defendants were convicted.)
While his appeal to black voters is self-evident, Mr. Jones is also culturally correct by Southern-white standards, a deer-hunting, bourbon-drinking, “Roll, Tide!” product of a Wallace-supporting household in Birmingham’s steel-mill suburbs, who did well as he did good. He is inarguably less “embarrassing” than Mr. Moore to the polite circles frequented by Mr. Strange, whose sister-in-law, Murray Johnston, a vocally anti-Trump quilt artist with whom I grew up in Birmingham, is working enthusiastically to elect Mr. Jones.
Not long ago, the path of progress seemed inevitable. At the time of the church bombing, after which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told Wallace that “the blood of our little children is on your hands,” the governor seemed to be the toxic tribune of a fading order. That arc of the universe seemed on track 23 years later when Alabama’s Democratic senator Howell Heflin, Mr. Jones’s old boss, cast the decisive vote against a federal judgeship for Jeff Sessions. In 1986, Mr. Sessions was considered beyond the moral pale.
Now Mr. Sessions is the attorney general, having vacated Mr. Heflin’s old Senate seat (the same one Mr. Moore and Mr. Jones hope to fill), and his zealous nativism set the scene for a winning presidential campaign. Donald Trump has upended the reconciliation script, recasting white nationalists as the victims — of an elite that includes an Ayn Rand-reading Republican House speaker as well as an arugula-eating black Democrat.
Defiance is now an epidemic as pervasive as opioids, and Alabama has transformed from backwoods to bellwether. While the press plays the defeat of Mr. Trump’s tepidly endorsed candidate as a debate over the prestige of his coattails, the president has swung the sacred trust of his office, the legacy of Lincoln, behind a candidate whose very existence confirms a republic in peril.
Meanwhile, Doug Jones studiously rejects the pressures of destiny, sticking to “kitchen-table issues” and staking his hopes on the voters’ “strong streak of independence” and a sense that “the health care debate has changed some dynamics down here.” After all, to this red state the most important tide of history is crimson.
The reddish text is actually crimson (hex code #DC143C).
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