The Politics of Resentment (1 of 2)

Let’s start with two governors. In 1958 in Alabama, a trial court judge, a moderate Democrat who was endorsed by the NAACP and who sat on the board of trustees the Tuskegee Institute, a prominent black educational institution, ran for governor against a candidate who was supported by the Ku Klux Klan. The moderate Democrat lost the election. The victorious candidate said he won because his opponent was soft on the race question. As he was preparing his concession remarks, George Wallace turned to his campaign team and said, “no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again.”

Wallace again ran for governor in 1962 and won. Several months after his inauguration, Wallace gained nationwide attention by standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama to bar black students from entering after the federal courts had ordered the integration of the university. In an event well covered by the national news media, Wallace confronted the US Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, put up his hand, and said to Katzenbach, “I hereby denounce and forbid this illegal and unwarranted action by the Central Government.” Wallace then backed down and within hours two black students were on the university campus.

In the following weeks Wallace received over 50,000 telegrams and letters from people outside the south, with 95% praising his stance. This almost shocked Wallace. He soon concluded that all whites were Southern. He realized that his push at racial resentment would be positively received across the entire nation. Wallace ran in 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976 as a third-party candidate for the presidency. In 1976, Wallace won nearly 14% of the popular vote. Wallace highlighted a campaign strategy of appealing to whites through their resentment or fear of minorities, especially blacks. While this campaign strategy first appeared in the deep South it was to expand nationwide.

Over on the West Coast, a Republican candidate for governor in 1966 developed a slightly different political strategy for his successful first attempt at elected office by winning the governorship of California. Ronald Reagan ran his campaign on two themes. He vowed to send “the welfare bums back to work” and to “clean up the mess at Berkeley.”

The anti-Vietnam War protest, although still in its early stages, was carried out in California with some intensity, especially at the University of California, Berkeley. In his 1967 inaugural address, Reagan stressed that “lawlessness by the mob, as with the individual, will not be tolerated. We will act firmly and quickly to put down riot or insurrection wherever and whenever the situation requires.” In focusing on the Free Speech Movement in UCAL Berkeley, he said “We believe it is no denial of academic freedom to provide this education within a framework of reasonable rules and regulations. Nor is it a violation of individual rights to require obedience to these rules and regulations or to insist that those unwilling to abide by them should get their education elsewhere.”

Three weeks after his inauguration Reagan was able to get the UCAL Berkeley president, Clark Kerr, fired. It was later discovered that during his campaign Reagan was in frequent contact with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who believed that the 1964 Free Speech Movement was a front for communist sympathizers. Hoover wanted the state to crack down on Berkeley students and thought Reagan, a rising conservative star, would be able to do it. Later in his life, Clark Kerr commented that the Free Speech Movement set in motion a political backlash that allowed Regan to capture the governorship.

In an October 1964 speech, Reagan addressed an important concern of his in a way that signaled how he communicated through stories: “Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who’d come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80-dollar raise. She’s eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who’d already done the same thing.”

Reagan consistently spoke out against the welfare state. He continually campaigned on a platform of sending “the welfare bums back to work.” In his second inaugural address in 1971, Reagan identified the state’s greatest problem: “Welfare costs have been increasing more than three times as fast as revenue and in this present year have escalated at an even faster rate…. Mandated by statute and federal regulation, welfare has proliferated and grown into a Leviathan of unsupportable dimensions…. I shall propose restructuring welfare to eliminate the waste and the impropriety of subsidizing those who greed is greater than their need. …Here in California nearly a million children are growing up in the stultifying atmosphere of programs that reward people for not working, programs that separate families and doom these children to repeat the cycle in their own adulthood.”

Reagan never let the welfare assistance saga die. In 1976, when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination, Reagan introduced the trope of the “welfare queen.” Picking up on an article in the Chicago Tribune newspaper, Reagan regaled his audience with the welfare queen story: “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” Reagan’s depiction of this one person became a powerfully influential trope of his 1980 presidential campaign speeches. The trope led many people, especially whites, to see all welfare recipients as poor Black women who were liars, cheats, and manipulators of federal payments.

Why is this significant?

Although the posts in this blog generally run chronologically this post is first because in my mind it provides the most direct link between the 1960s and 2016. The politics of division became popular during the 1960s. Politicans used resentment get elected, stay popular, and get re-elected. However, the use of resentment politics by Wallace, Reagan, and even Nixon cannot compare Trump’s continual, emphatic, and dominant use of resentment politics – both as a candidate and as president.

As a two-term governor and as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Reagan reprised Goldwater’s law and order theme, directing it at both campus disorders and riots or civil disorders. In doing so, he began to popularize what has since been labeled the politics of resentment. A resentment that served to contrast hard-working law-abiding citizens, especially those unable to afford college for their children, and those who either flaunted their collegial status with campus protests. And then he added to this division the resentment of hard working people toward loafing welfare cheats.

Running as a strong segregationist Wallace captured a large share of the white vote, especially in 1968. Although he won electoral votes from only five southern states, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, he garnered more than 10% of the popular vote in nineteen other states. A young political scientist by the name of Kevin Phillip had studied the presidential voting patterns of the prior presidential elections, which he put into a book titled The Emerging Republican Majority. Phillips’ book described the shift to conservative voting among whites, which was surprising to many since just four years earlier Johnson had won 61% of the popular vote.

The 1968 election confirmed Phillips’ theory and since that time many Republican presidential candidates, beginning in earnest with Nixon in 1972, followed a Southern or Sun Belt campaign strategy, a strategy that explicitly pursued white voters in the Sun Belt. It certainly worked for Nixon in 1972 as he won nearly 61% of the popular vote. Richard Nixon paid attention to the success of Goldwater’s, Wallace’s, and Reagan’s use of resentment politics to win elections.