"[George] Wallace is actually a crucial figure here. Nowadays,
Americans mainly remember him as a failed reactionary, or even a
snarling lunatic: the last die-hard Southern segregationist standing
with an axe outside a public school door. But in terms of his broader
legacy, he could just as well be represented as a kind of political
genius. He was, after all, the first politician to create a national
platform for a kind of right-wing populism that was soon to prove
so infectious that by now, a generation later, it has come to be
adopted by pretty much everyone, across the political spectrum."
David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules.
