Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I: The Populist Space of Appearance

The orator in question is not Donald Trump but George Wallace, the long time Alabama Governor, who, between 1964 and 1976, ran for President four consecutive times. While the Kennedy-Nixon TV debates had led to the widely held conviction that election campaigns in the age of television were a matter of carefully scripted, image-savvy self-presentation, Wallace rallies, particularly during the time span between his presidential campaigns of 1964 and 1972, opted for the opposite strategy. Wallace found techniques to raise the level of the affective energies circulating in the venues at which he spoke. He knew how to stoke rage and anger among his audience members, but he also knew how to make them laugh. He routinely railed against the federal government and Washington and East Coast elites, engaged in overt race-baiting (particularly up to 1972, after which point he began publically asking for forgiveness), and denigrated Vietnam protestors and the counter culture at large. His aim was not the projection of suave self-control but the collective loss of order and control. Protests by hecklers, followed by derisive
comebacks on the part of Wallace, were a standard element of his mass meetings – as was the violence that broke out between his supporters and the protestors (particularly during the campaign of 1968).
In many – though, significantly, not all – respects, what we have been witnessing at Donald Trump’s rallies since 2015 follows Wallace’s playbook. This article presents the first of two installments of a serial essay in which I will reflect on and theorize Trump’s rallies, drawing on examples from 2015 to shortly before the midterm elections of 2018, and in which I will furthermore compare and contrast Trump’s events with Wallace’s. (Part II will appear in the 2019 issue of REAL.) The reason for turning my attention to the format of the rally is my contention that American right wing populism – a tradition that was largely invented by Wallace, though it draws on earlier populist practices – crucially depends on rally performances. […]