The Emerging Republican Majority

"This is by Kevin Phillips. I don’t know his exact job title, but he worked for Richard Nixon. This was a classic book from 1969, about how American politics were changing. The idea was that, partly as a result of the Democrats becoming more uniformly liberal and having more support of blacks, Republicans would soon be able to get the support of various groups of white people, such as urban Catholics, who had traditionally been very strong Democrats. Richard Nixon could get political success, basically, by convincing a lot of white people – not the white people who are traditionally in charge of the country but so-called ethnic white people – that the Democrats were not on their side. Their pitch was that the Republicans were the only truly national party and the Democrats were a sectional party. The Democrats were representing interest groups and only Republicans were representing America. This was seemingly a very successful pitch, and it really mapped a new populism. It wasn’t a new argument. Nixon was making this argument back when he was Joe McCarthy’s buddy in the 1950s. Back then he was already arguing that the Democrats were a bunch of Communists and elitists, but the message didn’t catch on so well in the 1950s. Somehow it became more convincing around 1970 when the economy wasn’t going so well, and when there was a war in Vietnam and fighting in the streets. In the last few years Phillips has written some very angry books . He really detests George W Bush, basically arguing that the Republicans have been captured by a mixture of rich elites and extreme religious groups. If you look at a book like The Emerging Republican Majority , it’s not about the rich, it’s much more the idea that the Republicans are the sane middle of the country. He became a bit disturbed. This doesn’t discredit the Republicans, the fact that one of their operatives think they went too far. He’s just one guy. But it’s a very important book historically. It’s about a tactic that was actually followed successfully. It has insights in terms of how we got to where we are. Looking back, there was no reason to think the Republicans would become this alliance between some very religiously conservative people and these very economically conservative people. It was a different era of what was possible. Various industrialists at the time would have loved to have very low tax rates, but I don’t think it would have been considered possible. There have been big changes in American politics – big moves to the right on economic issues and to the left on social issues. This interview was published in June 2012, as the race between Romney and Obama for the US presidency entered its final stretch."