NY Times: “It is not hard to find, throughout American history, Trump-like demagogues with loyal followings. And these men tend to represent, most often, the popular expression of a certain will to power — the freedom to dominate. In practical terms, this means the freedom of the settler to seize the land around him and expel its original inhabitants, or it can mean the freedom of the master to expropriate the labor of others. Either way, these demagogues stand for a supposed right to exclude and exploit, always in defense of one hierarchy or another.
Beyond the obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking about this freedom to dominate because I have been reading “Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power” by the historian Jefferson Cowie. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize last year, is essentially a history of the freedom to dominate in the United States, told through the story of Barbour County, Ala., an unusually consequential place in the nation’s history….
A final thought: Wallace was a smart, clever and intellectually agile man. We are probably lucky that our demagogue, dangerous as he is, lacks those particular attributes. Even so, if Wallace has a legacy in national politics, it is very clearly Trump.”