Where political careers end

Alabama Gov. Albert Brewer shakes hands with former Gov. George Wallace on May 7, 1968, shortly after Brewer was sworn into office. Brewer succeeds former Gov. Lurleen Wallace, George Wallace’s wife, who had died in office. Brewer had been an ally of George Wallace early in his first term, but the relationship collapsed amid Wallace’s presidential ambitions and a bitter battle for the 1970 Democratic gubernatorial nomination, in which Wallace used overt racism against Brewer. (Alabama Department of Archives and History)

We have about 16 months before the 2026 state Republican primaries, the only elections that matter in Alabama. Big offices, including governor and attorney general, will be up for grabs.

That means a lot of GOP candidates, many with little to no name recognition, will fight for the attention of the 20% of the adult population of Alabama who vote in the primary.

I wish that would mean serious discussions of issues like criminal justice and health care. But we know what they’ll talk about.

Crude jokes about Hispanic immigrants. Bullying transgender youths. Complaints about a border hundreds of miles out of state. Shotgun. Pistol. Shotgun.

The 2025 legislative session, which starts next month, will give ambitious politicians and those ready to leverage the ambitions of politicians the chance to push any number of cruel and crude bills into law.

Already we have prefiled legislation from House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen, R-Hartselle targeting drag shows and overnight programs.

It feels rote at this point, but all these bills rest on a foundation of paranoia and — to put it charitably — distortion. To sell a bathroom ban in 2022, Stadthagen used a story about a 2010 assault on a student that the victim’s attorney said had nothing to do with transgender people.

Now he’s invoking the Space Camp non-controversy from last year, whipped up by the state’s conservative media, that led to threats to employees at that institution.

But the bill’s passage wouldn’t shock me. Paranoia is a good 30% to 35% of Alabama’s law code. It keeps politicians employed.

Still, I want to remind legislators of the lives of two of their predecessors: Albert Brewer and George Wallace.

Both men planted roots in the Alabama Legislature early in their careers. Wallace got to the governor’s mansion first in 1963, riding every awful impulse of the white Alabamian to do so.

When he was term-limited out of office in 1966, he got his wife Lurleen to run as his proxy. Lurleen Wallace died of cancer a little over a year into her term, leaving the office to Brewer, who had been her lieutenant governor.

Unlike George Wallace, who lost interest in administration the second he was inaugurated, Brewer cared about governing. He took steps to correct some of the blatant corruption of the Wallace era and kept a focus on state issues, doing important work on health care and highway construction.

Not all of Brewer’s stands were admirable: faced with long-delayed federal school desegregation orders, he advocated “school choice” programs that in practice would have kept Alabama’s schools racially divided.

But by the time Brewer sought a term in his own right in 1970 — at the same time another responsible politician named Jimmy Carter ran for governor of Georgia — he was moving toward a more inclusive and constructive vision for Alabama than Wallace had ever offered. Brewer pushed for ethics laws and a commission to revise the state’s 1901 constitution, framed to disenfranchise Blacks and poor whites.

Brewer met Wallace in the primary. Wallace had a desperate desire to be president — which he couldn’t do without first being governor — so he acted like a desperate man. First, he used dog whistles. Then he turned to out-and-out racism as a blunt force object on voters.

And Wallace won.

That’s what politicians in Alabama do: tell white voters that their basest instincts and most cowardly fears are right and just.

It’s likely fear, real or imagined, will dominate the 2026 election. The person who screams the loudest and hates the most will have the advantage.

But let me give that person — and every legislator dealing in hate this year — a reminder of how Wallace and Brewer ended their lives.

Wallace spent his twilight years in a state that had changed despite his anger and crude manipulations of white voters. He managed to get a fourth term in office in 1982. But he spent much of it trying to explain why he had upheld the evils of the state’s apartheid policy.

He did so in an extremely self-serving manner — “I was misled” was his usual line of argument. But that was all he could talk about. Wallace did nothing for the people of Alabama. Certainly nothing lasting.

After a failed run for governor in 1978, Brewer became a professor at Cumberland School of Law at Samford University. I’ve met a few of his former students, who all spoke warmly of him.

Brewer continued pushing for constitutional reform and chaired a committee that made several constitutional revision proposals, some of which became law. At those committee meetings, he was a serious but kind presence, a man who looked far younger than his 80-something years and commanded the respect and esteem of those present, many of whom could regret the choices those voters in 1970 made.

So to the folks at the Statehouse, especially those looking to the 2026 elections: Be Albert Brewer. Not George Wallace.

Don’t bait the voters. Take a chance of doing something good with the power you have. Because all political careers end. And if yours ends like Wallace’s, you’ll have nothing to celebrate and a lot to answer for.