The Prophet of Polarization

Kevin Phillips, a strategist for Richard Nixon whose 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority ushered in a new era in American politics, passed away earlier this week.

This morning, I joined some other scholars and pundits to offer thoughts on Phillips’ legacy in a short roundtable The Washington Post put together here.

But I’ve written at length about his work elsewhere, too. In 2019, my former grad student Dov Grohsgal and I marked the fiftieth anniversary of his book with this piece in The Atlantic.

As we noted there, Phillips didn’t create the Republican “southern strategy” but he certainly perfected it with the publication of a detailed blueprint for winning white votes with racially-coded appeals to “law and order.” The lines from his brand of politics to the MAGA Republicans of our own era are fairly clear, right down to Trump’s own use of even more explicitly racist appeals to “law and order” himself.

But as we detailed in that piece, there’s a tempting teleology that makes Nixon’s embrace of Phillips’ approach seem inevitable, when it was anything but.

When it was published, just seven months after Nixon’s inauguration, heavyweights in the Nixon White House pushed back. The speechwriter William Safire called the book “dangerous,” noting that a “tacit ‘writing off’ [of] any area is a big political mistake.” Even Nixon’s southern strategist, Harry Dent, a former aide to Senator Thurmond, warned against acknowledging the shift in regional priorities. “We should disavow Phillips’ book,” Dent wrote Nixon, “and assert we are growing in strength nationally.”

In its first year, the Nixon White House constructed a centrist image by coupling a host of conservative initiatives with a handful of liberal-leaning ones. This approach was clearest on civil rights, where the administration deliberately sent different signals to different constituencies. Nixon nominated to the Supreme Court two white southerners who had, to varying degrees, resisted civil rights, for example, and when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 came up for renewal, Mitchell testified against it. But at the same time, Nixon and Mitchell worked to ensure the peaceful integration of the last southern school districts that were still segregated.

The administration deliberately “furnish[ed] some zigs to go with our conservative zags,” the domestic-policy chief John Ehrlichman reminded the president. He pointed to the administration’s support for affirmative action in the “Philadelphia Plan” as an example. On the surface, Nixon’s support seemed out of step with his campaign promises; the Philadelphia Plan stemmed from one of LBJ’s most aggressive civil-rights policies. But Nixon’s aides saw it as a way to fracture the New Deal coalition by pitting civil-rights organizations and labor unions against each other. “Before long,” Ehrlichman later chuckled, “the AFL-CIO and NAACP were locked in combat over one of the most passionate issues of the day, and the Nixon administration was located in the sweet and reasonable middle.”

In contrast to this zigging and zagging, Phillips urged a clear move to the right on racial and social issues. “If you intend the pure conservative line which Phillips peddles,” a confused Ehrlichman told the president, “someone had better straighten me out.” Safire similarly argued that the administration “belong[ed] in the center with a solid appeal in both directions.”

But some of Nixon’s advisers welcomed Phillips’s call for a starkly regional strategy. The speechwriter Pat Buchanan called Phillips “a genius of sorts,” while a young Nixon operative named Tom Huston argued that Phillips was right about what made certain constituencies tick. The blue-collar white worker, Huston said, “fears that blacks are going to take his job, or move into his neighborhood, or beat up his kids at school.” (A few years later, Huston became infamous for devising a plan to spy on Nixon’s political enemies, which ultimately contributed to the unfolding of the Watergate scandal.)

In the short term, it wasn’t clear how well his plan would work. The 1972 election was a landslide for Nixon, but the 1970 midterms were a misfire and after Watergate the party would suffer huge setbacks in 1974 and 1976 again.

But as Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields detail in The Long Southern Strategy, Phillips’ plan took hold in the 1980s, as other strategists modified its racial appeals to include “family values” concerns of religious conservatives and GOP presidential candidates began sweeping the region.

Interestingly, Phillips broke with the party even as it embraced his plans. He became an outspoken critic of Reaganomics, which he absolutely savaged in a terrific (though now out of print) book called The Politics of Rich and Poor. (Here’s a CSPAN interview with him discussing it in 1990.)

He likewise criticized the twinned influence of the religious right and oil money in Republican politics, as seen in his Bush-era jeremiad American Theocracy.

Despite his disagreements with Reagan’s tax cuts and Bush’s embrace of the culture wars, Phillips still considered himself a conservative. (I had lunch with him after the 2000 election, and what I remember most was his absolute white-hot hatred for Al Gore.) But he was one who fancied himself, despite some of his own pretensions, as an ally of the white ethnic working class. He saw these trends as a betrayal of sorts.

I suspect he would’ve hated Donald Trump. But if so, it would’ve been because he recognized that he had a lot to do with bringing about Trump’s brand of polarizing politics.