Where’s Wallace?

Where’s Wallace? January 7, 2025

I came across a bunch of posts last summer on the trajectory and history of white evangelicals/Republicans over the past 60 years and bookmarked them or left the tabs open on my computer for months. Then Matthew Avery Sutton’s JAAR article on white evangelical historiography was published and that kind of sucked up all the attention on that subject matter for a while.

But I’ve still got all of those bookmarks and a few open tabs, so let me finally get around to those.

First up is Ryan Burge’s “A Sixty Year History of White Evangelicals and Politics.” His subtitle is “A comprehensive look at partisanship and voting patterns among the most important religious bloc on election day.”

That’s the post that prompted the question in the title of this post.

Lawrence Gilliard Jr. as D’Angelo Barksdale from that amazing scene in The Wire where he realizes that his family has had his young friend Wallace killed.

“Where’s Wallace, String? Where the f–k is Wallace.”

Except “Wallace” here doesn’t refer to the innocent young boy played by a very young Michael B. Jordan in The Wire, but rather to white segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who ran for president in 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976. As a third-party candidate in 1968, he won five states and won about 10 million popular votes — 13.53% of the total.

Burge writes:

I bristle at the underlying motivation of that question — why do White evangelicals vote for Trump? Because the answer is even simpler: They vote for Trump because White evangelicals are Republicans, and Donald Trump is the standard bearer of the GOP. That’s the same reason they voted for McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012.

However, I wanted to take a long view of this question — have White evangelicals always been Republicans, or is this a very recent phenomenon?

Burge’s Substack no longer lets us read his whole post for free, but before it fell behind the paywall I was able to read the full thing.

His answer to this long-view question was that white evangelicals — the Billy Graham orbit of post-war Protestantism that spun off from white fundamentalism — have always been politically conservative, but they haven’t always been so overwhelmingly Republican. He sees the increasingly partisan identification of white evangelicals as simply a corollary of the larger partisan polarization that took place from the 1960s through the 1980s, in which former conservative Democrats and former liberal Republicans switched parties.

So, in Burge’s view, the fact that many white evangelicals used to be conservative Democrats but switched parties over roughly the same time period that other conservative Democrats did just confirms his previous near-tautological thesis: White evangelicals do what they do because they’re Republicans and that’s what Republicans do. Why do they support Trump? For the same reason they supported Reagan. And Nixon. QED. NBD.

But again, String, where’s Wallace?

Where’s the Southern strategy? Where’s Atwater’s confession? Where in this “60-year History of White Evangelicals and Politics” is any of the history documented by historians like Dan T. Carter or Kevin Kruse or Carolyn Renée Dupont or Jesse Curtis or Anthea Butler or Jemar Tisby or Rusty Hawkins?

The mirror opposite of Burge’s colorbland 60-year history is Nick Rafter’s granular look at white working-class support for George Wallace from union workers in Michigan: “How Labor Undermined Itself in America.” Rafter pays almost as little attention to religion as Burge does to the race politics of white identity.

Alas, Rafter is also on Substack so his post is also now tucked behind that site’s paywall. Here’s a snippet I copied back when it was free to read:

In short, I don’t know the answer to this question. I don’t believe there is any economic message that the Democratic Party or progressives can sell to white working-class voters that will lead to them putting aside their cultural concerns. Progressives forget that no matter how hard they push economic issues, there will always be a conservative movement that keeps these voters fed with a healthy diet of cultural war anxieties. You can try to change the subject, but you can’t change a voter’s priorities. If you aren’t speaking to a voter’s top concerns, they will just ignore you.

I don’t believe class-based politics works in a multicultural society like the United States. It only ever has in homogenous societies and even then minorities often become targets (Jews in France and the Soviet Union for example, or Muslims in China). In the United States, the Populist movement of the 1890s unraveled over whether to include Blacks in their ideas, and New Deal policies were often designed to exclude them to get the support to pass Congress. It is no surprise that Civil Rights and the embrace of multiculturalism destroyed class solidarity.

My first reaction to his piece was that “cultural concerns” was too soft a euphemism. He was talking about white union support for the anti-union segregationist Wallace. There wasn’t a vast cluster of “cultural concerns” animating that support.

But I think the obvious inadequacy of that euphemism is exactly why Rafter accepts and repeats the use of it, exposing it for the sham that it is.

And that’s why his piece is such a useful corrective and antidote to Burge’s contention that white evangelicals are Republicans because that’s the party of “social conservatives” who support all the various proxies that have come and gone over the years to serve as cover for the gigantic, looming “cultural concern” that undergirds them all.

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