The cowboy boots almost shimmer with deception. Accented with gold, the boots are striped in red and white at their shafts, and then blue, spangled with white stars, at their heels. They are hard-tipped and high-heeled, too fancy-looking to be useful for anything much besides wearing them to political rallies to signify one’s real Americanness. These boots are what Sarah Palin, the former Vice-Presidential candidate and current Tea Party leader, wore last month, when she showed up in Alabama and inserted herself into the Republican primary race to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions. Palin was joining Steve Bannon, the cast-out former adviser to President Trump, who had also travelled to Alabama to try to sway the election—in anticipation of the role that his and Palin’s chosen candidate, a judge named Roy Moore, could play in their efforts to drag the President back toward his ultra-right-wing base. “We can win this war!” Palin said gleefully after Moore’s victory.
Moore is gleeful, too, shaking Palin’s hand, grinning in a red tie that matches her “Make America Great Again”-hued blouse. He knows what Palin is doing, why Bannon took an interest in him, and he long has been playing a central role in the drama of fundamentalist grandstanding in Alabama. (As the state’s chief justice, he was a constant source of embarrassment for progressive Alabamians, defying federal orders by keeping a giant monument of the Ten Commandments that he had erected inside a judicial building and telling probate judges to stop issuing same-sex-marriage licenses.) Alabama has long been used as a blank slate for outside politicians, a place pure enough in its conservativeness to be manipulated and used for gain. Ten years ago, the fall and the imprisonment of the Democratic governor Don Siegelman—who was charged with corruption, but claimed that Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys were behind his prosecution—was eventually attributed to the maneuverings of the political operative Karl Rove. Alabama hasn’t had a Democratic governor since Siegelman left office, in 2003.
And so, in Alabama, the idea of the two-party race tends to manifest itself in the Republican primary, where the candidates can often be of very different types. Moore had a reputation as a politician who wanted to bring God into politics, but his opponent, Luther Strange, was known locally as more of a moderate who had sold out his good sense to appeal to more hard-line voters. As my colleague Charles Bethea wrote, many Republican residents found both men to be undesirable choices. Poll turnout, as a result, was low. Unlike in other primaries, a center—a candidate who could resonate with non-extremists—was absent, and so potential voters felt disillusioned with and shut out of a process that seemed to have forgotten them. Both Moore and Strange played up their most Trumpist qualities—Moore was just more convincing, and had the better fortune to come out on top.
Palin’s arm is awkwardly raised at the elbow, a forced sign of strength, and, at least temporarily, of solidarity, as Moore grasps her hand with both his hands in gratitude. Trump had backed Strange until it was no longer politically convenient, visiting Alabama for one of the candidate’s rallies and making appeals to “our heritage” and the specialness of the state. It was a place, Trump implied, that was more righteous in its values—ones that aligned with his own. Perhaps. The Democratic contender for the Senate seat, Doug Jones, was recently trailing Moore by less than imagined, and the pool of people who said that they intended to vote for him included more than just Democrats. His win is still unlikely, but some Alabamians might be tired of being told who they are, and what they supposedly want.