Racism, populism, and fake news in politics is nothing new.

George Wallace, four-time governor of Alabama known for his racism and resistance to racial integration in the South, ran for president in a third-party bid in 1968.

Wallace's populist campaign resembles much of what the US dealt with in 2016, and continues to see in politics today.

He opened his doors for anyone who felt that the game had been rigged against them—voters who “felt their good jobs, their modest homes, and their personal safety were under siege both from liberal authorities above and angry minorities below.”

He echoed ideas propagated by The John Birch Society, a group that believed the US and Soviet governments were controlled by the same conspiratorial group of internationalists, bankers, and politicians.

Although he lost, some right-wing Republicans warmed up to Wallace.

The following is an excerpt from "Every Man a King: A Short, Colorful History of American Populists" by Chris Stirewalt:

As a judge in the early 1950s, he was known for his decorous treatment of African American lawyers and relatively merciful sentences for some black defendants. He even secured an appointment to the board of trustees for the all-black Tuskegee Institute.

When he first ran for governor in 1958, it was not on a platform of segregation, but rather one of economic populism.

Wallace’s stinging defeat—aided by accusations that he was insufficiently racist as a judge and soft on Truman—changed him. He was reborn as a race hustler.

“You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened,” Wallace told a supporter about his change of heart. “And then I began talking about n——s, and they stomped the floor.”

Here we meet the central problem we face with populism:

What do we do when what’s popular is wrong? What the people—or at least the enfranchised white people—of Alabama wanted was wicked. Wallace knew it. He knew it so well that he would despair of his views later and recant. But the only way for him to climb the ladder of power was to give the people what they wanted.

John Adams knew about such things, and had gone to great pains to warn the populists of his day about the George Wallaces to come. In an 1814 letter to Virginia Anti-Federalist John Taylor, one of the most influential agrarian populists of the early republic, the former president was unsparing.

“It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy,” Adams wrote. “It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

And let me tell you, if you wanted to see fraud, violence, and cruelty, the politics of Alabama in the days of Wallace would surely fit the bill.

America met forty-three-year-old Wallace standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium, where he symbolically refused the command of Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who had come from Washington with an order from President Kennedy desegregating the school.

What Wallace found, though, was that a lot of Americans who weren’t as deeply invested in the issue of legal segregation still resented people like Katzenbach, a product of Princeton, Yale, and Oxford, not to mention powerful family connections. These were the eastern elites who, as Wallace would say so often, “look down their noses” at ordinary Americans.

Johnson was able to box out Wallace in 1964 with relatively little difficulty, but Wallace would be back and better able to exploit the grievances and sense of persecution in a growing sector of the electorate. He had picked up race-baiting at the beginning of the decade to get ahead in Alabama; now he was ready to shift his focus again to make his play in the rest of the country.

Balloons go up in Madison Square Garden, the night of Oct. 24, 1968, as a crowd of about 17,500 gathered to hear third party candidate George C. Wallace. AP

What was selling with a big segment of the rest of America just then was resentment toward the Nicholas Katzenbachs of the world.

Prevented by term limits from seeking another term as governor in 1966, Wallace had gotten his wife, Lurleen, elected in his place. Knowing that his home fires were burning strong, the first gentleman of Alabama was free to start crisscrossing the country in service of his 1968 presidential campaign.

The influx of black voters to the Democratic Party in the wake of civil rights legislation made it even less likely that Wallace could capture his party’s nomination. To circumvent that problem and to accommodate his new friends on the far right, Wallace opted to run a third-party bid and founded the American Independent Party.

Wallace knew he was unlikely to win the presidency outright, but believed that if he were to win enough support in the South, he could force a deadlock in the Electoral College and throw the race to the House of Representatives.

But then things changed.

Enfeebled by the growing opposition to the war in Vietnam, Johnson showed poorly in the 1968 New Hampshire primary against antiwar candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy.

Johnson’s fizzle prompted Robert Kennedy to drop his support for Johnson and declare his own candidacy in March of that year. That, in turn, prompted Johnson to drop out of the contest in favor of his vice president and the lead author of the Civil Rights Act, Hubert Humphrey.

This was all good news for Wallace, who then knew that the Democrats would be nominating a northern liberal, whether it was Humphrey, Kennedy, or McCarthy.

Republicans, scalded by their 1964 nomination of conservative senator Barry Goldwater, had a taste for moderation.

Richard Nixon, former vice president and narrow loser of the 1960 campaign, was considered the safe course for the GOP between the liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and Goldwater heir California governor Ronald Reagan.

Wallace could have hardly asked for a better scenario. At a time when antiestablishment sentiment was running high, the major parties had picked establishmentarians of the first order. Wallace was understaffed and underfunded by comparison to his major-party opponents, but he was not without some advantages.

Americans today bemoan the way that social media facilitates the spread of false information and conspiracy theories. Things were better, we are told, when a handful of trusted sources vetted and disseminated the news. And in some ways that’s true, since the profusion of news sources has allowed Americans to retreat into partisan cocoons where they can go unmolested by opposing points of view.

But don’t ever kid yourself that ours is the first era of fake news.

Twelve Books

In 1958, retired candy maker Robert Welch started the John Birch Society, named for an Army intelligence officer killed by communist forces in China just after the end of World War II.

Welch called Birch the first casualty of the Cold War. Welch recruited eleven other wealthy businessmen to form the society, which focused not so much on developing a large rank-and-file membership as on cultivating a relatively small number of dedicated true believers.

Even so, at its peak the John Birch Society would boast at least one hundred thousand members in chapters across the country.

New recruits were given a book of Welch’s teachings and shown films outlining his worldview.

“Both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians,” Welch wrote in The Blue Book of the John Birch Society. “If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country’s sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a ‘one-world socialist government.’ ”

If any of that sounds familiar to you today, it’s because the Birchers proved remarkably successful at pushing these concepts into the mainstream. They were hardly the first to warn of the dangers of internationalism, but they were enormously efficient at condensing and distributing the point of view.

Here’s how the New York Times described the reach of the society in the mid-1960s: “a budget of $8 million a year and 270 paid employees, many of them working out of a headquarters in Belmont, Mass.; a book publishing house; two monthly publications; a speakers’ bureau; a radio program and 400 Birch-owned bookstores.”

The message of the Wallace campaign was increasingly close to that of the Birchers, and campaign staffers and volunteers often came straight out of Birch chapters.

Wallace kept “Stand up for America” as his slogan in 1968, but augmented it with a new rallying cry: “Send ’em a message!” Having declared that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two major parties, Wallace threw open the doors to his new party for anyone who felt that the game had been rigged against them—as historian Michael Kazin put it, the voters who “felt their good jobs, their modest homes, and their personal safety were under siege both from liberal authorities above and angry minorities below.”

Or, as Wallace’s American Independent Party platform would put it, “The average American [is] confused and dismayed when these leaders desert the principle of government for the people and dedicate themselves to minority appeasement as the country burns and decays.”

There was pretty strong evidence of burn and decay in 1968, too. Riots swept through dozens of cities in the wake of King’s assassination, campus protests were a constant presence, and the Black Panthers were grabbing headlines. The news from Vietnam was also bad with the Tet offensive and more than sixteen thousand American servicemen killed over the course of the year.

To Wallace and his supporters, the communists were winning the Cold War overseas, in the streets, and in the halls of power in Washington.

His campaign advisers would urge Wallace to focus his efforts on winning across the South, emphasizing Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia as potential pick-ups beyond his presumptive base in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas. If Wallace won most of the electoral votes of the former Confederacy, he would be poised to play kingmaker in what was expected to be a close race between Humphrey and Nixon.

Wallace, though, was thinking bigger. He remembered what he saw in Wisconsin four years prior and was also reveling in the extraordinary press coverage he was getting in his travels across the country. Quotes that reporters repeated to viewers and readers for shock value did not offend his target voters, but instead excited them.

He called long-haired hippie protesters “sweetie,” promised to run over any “anarchists” whose protests impeded his motorcade, and said that the only four-letter words they didn’t know were “w-o-r-k” and “s-o-a-p.” Audiences and voters at home ate it up.

Wallace was showing considerable strength in the polls, passing the 20 percent threshold late in the summer and approaching a quarter of the vote. Union members were increasingly unwilling to back Humphrey, and right-wing Republicans were starting to warm up to Wallace. It was the kind of left-right fusion campaign that many have attempted but none have come so close to pulling off.

Excerpted from "Every Man a King: A Short, Colorful History of American Populists" by Chris Stirewalk. Published by Twelve Books, 2018.