And even when the elites were in charge of the racism, they could not always control the monster white supremacy they had created. In Birmingham, the fire hoses and police dogs of Eugene Connor, known as Bull, a city commissioner installed by the “Big Mules,” not only hastened the end of legal segregation but also made his city kryptonite for economic development.

The axiom of unintended consequences is the same today, and explains why populism remains ideologically incoherent: Caught up in feel-good spasms of nativism, the base is willing to overlook the Trump administration’s elite, kleptocratic culture. And the tax-cut-hungry Republican establishment keeps sowing the whirlwind, under the assumption that, in Mr. Kennedy’s words, its base “would rather be poor than not be proud.” Though the party — and Mr. Trump — backed Mr. Moore’s button-down runoff opponent, Luther Strange, it has shown no hesitation in pivoting to the winner.

But the Alabama psyche is complex, and Mr. Trump may have misread it at the now legendary rally in Huntsville where he tore into knee-taking black N.F.L. players — many of whom come out of Alabama football programs and therefore, Mr. Kennedy dryly observed, “are family.” Not surprisingly, it is in the biracial character of modern football that Alabamians feel comfortable expressing their redemptive impulses, so much so that Mr. Trump received a mild rebuke from the state’s spiritual leader, the Alabama football coach Nick Saban.

Also important to that redemption narrative is the South’s belated prosecution of civil rights era crimes, and one of its major protagonists is Doug Jones, Mr. Moore’s Democratic opponent for the Dec. 12 special election. As the United States attorney for North Alabama under Bill Clinton, Mr. Jones brought murder charges against the last two living suspects in Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which killed four black girls in 1963. (I have been friends with Mr. Jones since covering the two trials, in 2001 and 2002, at which the two defendants were convicted.)

While his appeal to black voters is self-evident, Mr. Jones is also culturally correct by Southern-white standards, a deer-hunting, bourbon-drinking, “Roll, Tide!” product of a Wallace-supporting household in Birmingham’s steel-mill suburbs, who did well as he did good. He is inarguably less “embarrassing” than Mr. Moore to the polite circles frequented by Mr. Strange, whose sister-in-law, Murray Johnston, a vocally anti-Trump quilt artist with whom I grew up in Birmingham, is working enthusiastically to elect Mr. Jones.

Not long ago, the path of progress seemed inevitable. At the time of the church bombing, after which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told Wallace that “the blood of our little children is on your hands,” the governor seemed to be the toxic tribune of a fading order. That arc of the universe seemed on track 23 years later when Alabama’s Democratic senator Howell Heflin, Mr. Jones’s old boss, cast the decisive vote against a federal judgeship for Jeff Sessions. In 1986, Mr. Sessions was considered beyond the moral pale.