American politics, or at least mainstream party politics, generally does not advance in line with manifestos, programs and systematic political analyses. But now and then, a single publication seems to capture a change in the direction of American politics just as it is occurring. Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority is one of those rarities.
To be sure, as Phillips explains in the introduction to this new James Madison Library edition, much of the original commotion about the book was misplaced. Seeking to make sense of what many considered Richard M. Nixon’s improbable victory amid the turmoil of 1968, pundits from across the political spectrum seized on Phillips’s examination as some sort of master plan, from which the GOP had supposedly drawn what was already becoming known as its Southern Strategy. In truth, Phillips was barely involved in the larger planning of that legendary race. During the late stages of the 1968 campaign, he proffered timely advice based on his findings that proved helpful to Nixon’s strategists, but he always functioned more as an observer of politics than a political operative. The Emerging Republican Majority did not design the shift to conservatism in 1968 as much as it described that shift’s long- and short-term origins.
Phillips’s work offered a dazzling account, filled with charts and other data, of how and why the national coalition that elected Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and then sustained the New Deal had unraveled over the previous quarter century. Then the book explored that unraveling’s profound implications. It was less a blue-print for victory than a topographical map of the changed political terrain of the late 1960s. In providing that map, the book served as a harbinger not of particular events but of the major trends that led to a conservative political era, one that in the 1980s brought the advent of President Ronald Reagan—a leader who embodied the transfiguration of the New Deal majority.
It is difficult to convey how much Phillips’s conclusions ran against the grain of the conventional political wisdom of the 1950s and 1960s. It was a time when scholars and pundits alike were expounding upon a great liberal consensus in American politics. Despite brief outbursts of conservative and even right-wing fury—the latter exemplified by the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy—the New Deal’s basic principles of active government appeared to have triumphed. The most successful Republicans in national politics were moderates, above all President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who campaigned and then governed in the name of what became known as Modern Republicanism. Even in opposition, the GOP appeared to have become reconciled to many of the institutional innovations implemented by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats during the 1930s, notably Social Security.
In 1964, dissident conservatives and right-wingers, having captured the GOP party machinery, nominated Barry Goldwater for the presidency. Mocking what they beheld as the moderate and liberal Republican establishment, the Goldwater forces promised that they would offer the voters “a choice, not an echo.” Yet the electorate handed Goldwater one of the worse shellackings in the history of American presidential politics. As the victor Lyndon B. Johnson and his administration geared up to redouble the New Deal with Johnson’s Great Society programs, civil rights reforms and War on Poverty, claims about the liberal consensus seemed vindicated. It appeared as if the forward march of liberal politics would never end.
In 1966, however, a stunning Democratic debacle in the midterm elections brought the conventional wisdom up short. Some found the ferocity of the backlash difficult to explain, but others pointed out how acrid the political climate had become in just two years, amid escalation of the American military effort in Vietnam, rioting in urban black ghettoes, Johnson’s declining popularity and a general souring by the public on ambitious liberal reform. Phillips’s figures, though, not only accounted for the sudden reversal; they also showed how a new national political configuration—its foundations in a region stretching from Florida to California that Phillips dubbed the “Sun Belt”—had been taking shape for many years. That configuration would twice elect Richard Nixon to the White House; it would then survive Nixon’s disgrace in Watergate and in time become the foundation for a Reagan Republican ascendancy that lasted (by Phillips’s own reckoning) until 1992.
Phillips made no secret of his political allegiances amid the great realignment, as he dedicated his book to the “two principal architects” of the new Republican majority, President Nixon and Nixon’s former campaign manager, Attorney General John Mitchell. Such are the perils of politics and political judgments: six years after the book appeared, one of the dedicatees would be a convicted felon and the other an unindicted co-conspirator who, facing certain impeachment, had resigned the presidency. Following Nixon’s downfall, the entire Republican Party seemed shamed; it even appeared as if liberalism might enjoy a resurgence. Yet to the great credit of Phillips’s analysis, that liberal comeback quickly proved a flash in the pan. Instead, the basic political trends and emerging conservative era that Phillips had detected at the time of Nixon’s election came into their own a dozen years later under Reagan, a far more ideologically charged conservative Republican.
Strikingly, Phillips viewed American electoral politics as an arena of cultural warfare. Whereas many analysts viewed political alignments chiefly in class or in regional terms, Phillips understood the centrality of ethnicity, religion and national origins in shaping political allegiances, even among seemingly similar groups. Scandinavian Lutherans, for example, might be disposed to vote one way, German Catholics another. But at the heart of Phillips’s argument—controversially so, then and now—was his emphasis on the primacy of race. What he called “the Negro problem” of the 1950s and 1960s had, he wrote in the original introduction, “become a national problem rather than a local one” and was proving to be the principal cause of the New Deal coalition’s demise.
To its many critics, the book’s translation of the civil rights struggle into “the Negro problem,” and its seeming indifference to the bigotry, northern and southern, that lay behind much of the alienation of white erstwhile New Dealers, was, as it remains, deeply disturbing. Given the author’s connections to the Nixon campaign, his book has even been read as a piece with the appeals to white prejudice, sometimes overt, sometimes subtle, that accompanied to Nixon-Reagan ascendancy. Viewed more coldly, though, Phillips’s analysis pointed to a palpable reality that Democrats and liberals either tried to wish away or simply denounced as racist—that in forthrightly embracing civil rights, the Democratic liberalism of the 1960s and after, fairly or unfairly, left itself vulnerable to the perception that it had turned away from the interests and values of the broad white middle and working classes. That perception, albeit mutated, still remains a feature of American politics; for a quarter century, it proved essential to the conservative national majority that Phillips perceived so clearly.
We live today amid the rubble of that old conservative coalition, but with no new political order standing firmly in its place. There has been talk for more than a decade of a rising national Democratic majority consisting of minorities, working and single women, the college educated and skilled professionals—yet that coalition, although real, has produced uneven results and its continued success is far from certain. What is clear is that The Emerging Republican Majority still shapes the way political commentators envisage American politics. In 2002, when the political writers John Judis and Ruy Teixeira forecast what they saw as the coming liberal coalition, they entitled their book The Emerging Democratic Majority. It was a fitting tribute. Whatever the future, Kevin Phillips’s youthful labor of love will long remain a landmark work for understanding the political travails of the 1960s—and for interpreting the changing whorls of American politics in our own times.
Sean Wilentz