The presidential candidate is a harbinger of the future that we have become a terrible present. Perhaps the most spectacular grassroots uprising in US history has put his name on ballots in all 50 states. He drew 18,000 listeners to Boston Common in Hawthorne and Emerson’s New England, far away in Alabama. Misery loves sad examples – assures that there were times when the political life of a country was as odious as it is now. So try Chapman University historian Luke A. Nichter’s “The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968.” Nichter argued that George Wallace, with his “class-based message,” created an “enduring movement.”

Source: Washington Post October 22, 2023 14:01 UTC