This is an opinion column.
Later this year, I’m going to see the Drive-By Truckers’ “Southern Rock Opera Revisited” tour, to finally hear a song live that I’ve had in my playlists since Steve Jobs put iPods in our pockets.
I know “All should be forgiven,”
but he did what he done so well.
So throw another log on the fire boys!
George Wallace is coming …
Sung from the perspective of the Devil, the Great Deceiver is delighted that company’s on the way, the old Southern guv who “had what it took to take it so far.”
Now the Devil’s got a Wallace sticker
on the back of his Cadillac!
It’s supposed to be a warning for — and of — ambitious, unprincipled people in search of power.
But not even the song’s Father of Lies seems to know the answer to one of Alabama’s old questions: Which was the real George Wallace?
A.) The somewhat progressive, racial moderate defeated in 1958 by the segregationist John Patterson,
B.) The man who proclaimed “Segregation Forever!” at his inauguration one election cycle later, or …
C.) The broken old man in a wheelchair who begged forgiveness from Black political and religious leaders near the end of his life.
In the song, Ol’ Scratch seems to think the answer doesn’t matter.
And if it’s true that he wasn’t a racist,
and he just did all them things for the votes,
I guess Hell’s just the place for kiss-ass politicians
who pander to assholes.
The Devil may not care, but I can’t let go so easily. Call it the Wallace Conundrum — it’s a question as important today as it was 60 years ago.
In 2024, our political world is overrun with politicians making similar shifts, and voters are left to wonder which manifestations are real.
You can see it in the discourse (and inevitable TV ads) regarding J.D. Vance’s actual beliefs, whatever those are. Did he mean it when he said Trump could be America’s Hitler? Or was that guy on stage at the Republican National Convention the real Vance? Is Donald Trump a cultural opioid, as Vance called him, or the last hope for the working class?
I have a shelf full of books written by well-credentialed academics trying to answer the Wallace Conundrum, none to my satisfaction. So it was a surprise to hear what might be a definitive answer, not from a journalist nor a historian, but from the U.S. Secretary of Transportation.
Speaking on Real Time with Bill Maher, Pete Buttigieg recalled his experience with such characters, including his former Indiana governor, Mike Pence. Vance is only the latest.
“I knew a lot of people like him when I got to Harvard,” Buttigieg said. “I found a lot of people like him who would say what they needed to to get ahead. And five years ago that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican, so that’s what he was.”
Then things changed, and so did Vance.
“Five years later, the way he gets ahead is [to say Trump’s] the greatest guy since sliced bread,” Buttigieg said.
Could the answer to the Wallace Conundrum is as simple as “None of the above”?
The problem with the Wallace Conundrum is that the question supposes that one of the Wallaces is the real Wallace, when the most likely possibility is that they’re all fakes.
There are people we all know — and like Buttigieg, I met my share in college — who care less about the right answer and more for the right answer right now. They will change their beliefs, their clothes, their haircuts — whatever it takes — to suit the situation, to please whoever’s approval they crave.
They’re the political Shape Shifters.
Such changes shouldn’t be confused with changing one’s mind. Healthy minds evolve to incorporate new information, evidence or experience. In contrast, Shape Shifters change to fit new attitudes or new audiences — for approval.
Those closest to Wallace understood this about him. What mattered wasn’t beliefs, ideas or principles, but getting ahead.
“If George had parachuted into the Albanian countryside in the spring of 1962, he would have been head of a collective farm by the fall, a member of the Communist Party by mid-winter, on his way to the district party meeting as a delegate by the following year, and a member of the Comintern into two or three years,” Wallace adviser John Kohn once told historian Dan Carter.
“Hell,” he said. “George could believe whatever he needed to believe.”
There was never a real Wallace. He changed as his circumstances did. He was the champion Shape Shifter.
At least until Donald Trump showed up.
Sometimes Shape Shifters get caught in flux, as Trump did in 2021, when he bragged about Project Warp Speed and got booed by Alabamians who didn’t believe in vaccines. Three years later, Trump now woos his rival, independent candidate and anti-vaxer Robert Kennedy Jr., by saying you can see the babies change after they are injected.
RFK Jr. might be a kook with a brainworm, but at least he believes what he believes.
It should be no surprise, Shape Shifters don’t like it when anyone questions their inconsistencies. Donald Trump’s antipathy toward the press isn’t because it’s the “enemy of the people.” Journalists are in natural opposition to Shape Shifters because we write things down and record things.
It’s a sensible question to ask whether this is what democracy wants — someone who will respond to feedback from the people?
The trouble with Shape Shifters is that, while they’re good at rising to power, they often don’t know what to do when they get it. There’s no one above anymore to clue them into the right answer. And when novel problems arise — there’s no public opinion yet to follow. The Shape Shifters come unmoored from what got them there, and suddenly you have a president suggesting people shoot bleach in the veins.
As the Truckers sang, they have what it takes to take it so far.
But no further.
And in the end, we all wind up back in the same place — with another log on the fire, and the Devil with another sticker on the back of his Cadillac.
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