Rich Lowry: Our George Wallace

George Wallace knew how to handle the hecklers who routinely disrupted his events. "These are the folks," he declared at a rally in 1968, "that people like us are sick and tired of. You've been getting a good lesson in what we've been talking about. They talk about free speech but won't allow it to others."

Wallace knew the protesters were priceless to him in stoking passions and drawing media attention. "They are on our payroll," he joked.

George Wallace had unsurpassed skills as a popular agitator, but even he would have to admire how Donald Trump parlayed a canceled Chicago event where supporters and protesters shoved and punched one another into wall-to-wall media coverage and an advertisement for his alleged stalwartness against the forces of anarchy.

Trump bears a striking resemblance to Wallace, another entertaining, anti-establishment bomb-thrower who became – to the shock of respectable people – a kind of tribune of the American working class. He is a voice of rough-hewn populism that hasn't had such potent expression since the Alabama governor ran for president, finding more support than anyone thought possible. (Stephan Lesher's biography, "George Wallace: American Populist," is the source for much of what follows.)

Like Trump, Wallace was hated by his own party's establishment, and widely discounted by political observers until his strength in 1968 as a third-party candidate became undeniable.

He talked tough. He warned protesters getting in the way of his car that it would be "the last car they ever blocked."

He was anti-intellectual. He lambasted "pointy-headed professors who can't even park a bicycle straight."

He hated the media (while soaking up coverage). Journalists were "sissy-britches intellectual morons."

He relished the idea of cracking down on speech he disliked. He promised "to seek indictment against any college professor who calls for a communist victory ."

He was light on policy. He didn't produce a platform until three weeks before the election in 1968, and it was full of meaningless platitudes.

He had no principled opposition to government, and in fact, touted programs he found congenial.

He had no hesitation in making absurdly paranoid accusations, claiming Richard Nixon was manipulating public opinion in 1968 through his control of pollsters.

Like Trump, Wallace didn't run a highly organized political operation – he lived off the land of his own native political talent and the fervent support of his fans. He relied on what one journalist called – in a formulation that could apply equally well to Trump – his "uncanny and total and undistracted instincts for the primitive dynamics of the American democratic system."

Wallace was a hideous racist who appealed to racists, but also crystallized a deeper anger and discontent with a country that had gone soft and wasn't winning anymore. He obviously wasn't a statesman, but a demagogue who exploited these popular passions and made them more base. The same is true of Trump.

Yet Wallace never came close to capturing a major party's nomination and arriving at the doorstep of the presidency. With Donald Trump leading in the Republican contest, the real-estate mogul would probably have not just George Wallace's respect, but his envy.

(Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.)

(c) 2015 by King Features Synd., Inc.