For history's sake, we should distinguish between those who got the name "neo-conservative" and Wallaceites. The neo-cons were dominated by ex-socialists, many Jewish. They certainly benefitted from the strengthening of the GOP from the Wallace movement, but they came from a different place and had a different ideology. Still do. Now there is an on-going holy war between them and the so-called 'paleo-conservatives,' typified by Wallace types and Pat Buchanan (the real nativists). It's best to keep our right-wingers straight.
Once upon a time Wallace was a real populist, but he turned around much faster than Tom Watson -- before he even got to the Governor's office, in fact. Southern does not equal populist; there is also the Bourbon tradition -- the guys who shot populists. Best to keep our southerners straight too.
Without question the Southern populist movement was not a fundamentally anti-racist one. But it was not dedicated to racism either, like its Bourbon/Democratic competition. Farmers did not join the Grange, Farmer's Alliance, and Peoples Party to hound blacks. They joined because deflation was driving them to bankruptcy destitution, and literal servitude to other whites. The *Democrats* were the sectional party. The Southern populists were allied w/the hated Mid-West. Along the way, they developed a healthy dislike for monopolists (great and small), parasitic finance, & railroads, and a healthy interest in cooperatives, an elastic money supply, and industrial unionism. So I will continue in my quest to recover the threads of this tradition, the authentic radical ideology of actual working people in the U.S.
mbs
chuck said: . . . While I was looking around for material to rip Mead's slime on Helms apart I came across a much more interesting idea. The Neo-Conservative reactionaries who dominate the Republican party today are actually the ideological heirs of George Wallace. Their formative struggle took place in the middle of Nixon's 1972 campaign to isolate Wallace and take over his potential constituency in the South. Here is the link:
http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/spring96/wallace.html
. . . Little wonder those slimes and scum at WSJ, the White House, and the Republican party don't want to get too maudlin over Helms. Hell, somebody might begin looking around for some of the other creeps from that long gone era and find/remember what I just did. Thanks to Dan Carter for reminding me where these pricks came from and what they really represent. They need to be absolutely stigmatized and Wallace is the perfect means to do so.