AP Photo
Richard Nixon, then vice president, with Senate Republican leaders in 1960
“The whole secret of politics,” Kevin Phillips told Garry Wills in 1968, is “knowing who hates who.”
For a time—particularly during the 1960s—Phillips was likely the nation’s foremost expert on who hated who. As a young scholar of what we might call political demographics, Phillips had noted that the states of the Deep South had forsaken the Democratic Party to vote for Barry Goldwater in the presidential election of 1964, largely due to Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act on the Senate floor earlier that year. Phillips had also noted the votes that George Wallace, Alabama’s segregationist governor, had racked up against President Lyndon Johnson in that year’s Democratic presidential primaries in Wisconsin and Maryland, pulling down a third or more of the votes, chiefly from white working-class voters.
In a memo to 1968 Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon, on whose campaign he worked, Phillips wrote, “The fulcrum of re-alignment is the law and order/Negro socio-economic revolution syndrome, and [Nixon] should continue to emphasize crime, decentralization of federal social programming, and law and order.” Republicans had generally written off the South since the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s. But in his memo to Nixon and in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority, Phillips, who died earlier this month at age 82, called upon Republicans to pursue a “Southern strategy” by pandering to the region’s anti–civil rights backlash. In time, this not only turned the white South into the Republicans’ base but also, decades later, turned Northern state Republican parties into bastions of Southern white values, such as they were.
While Goldwater had run on those themes in 1964, it’s important to realize that at the time the Republican mainstream had yet to embrace them, and in many cases, even consider them. Unlike Goldwater, nearly every other Republican senator had voted for the Civil Rights Act, in keeping with its image as the party of Abraham Lincoln. When Nixon, the very personification of the Republican mainstream, embraced Southern values as well, managing to capture some Southern states and win more Northern Democratic white working-class votes than a Republican normally captured, the template was set for the party’s future strategy, which in many ways is also the party’s current strategy.
But not in all ways. Nixon wasn’t an enemy of government as such; he was, after all, the man who signed the Environmental Policy Act into law and indexed Social Security benefits to changes in the cost of living. He did, however, try to implement “the decentralization of federal social programming” (i.e., give the white South and other white communities a way to curtail Black advancement), which under Ronald Reagan morphed into opposing federal social programming altogether.
At which point, Phillips got off the train.
There were really only three veterans of Nixon’s campaign who went on to post-Nixon careers of note, if you exclude all those whose post-Nixon careers landed them in jail for their involvement in Watergate. Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan was to double down on the who-hates-who aspects of Nixonism, proclaiming at an earlier point and more loudly than any of his fellow Republicans that the nation was embroiled in a culture war against immigrants, non-Christians, feminists, racial minorities, secularists, and so forth. Fellow Republicans, he intoned, should stand with him at Armageddon and battle for, if not the Lord, then at least Republican culture warriors like him. Buchanan sought and lost the 1992 and 1996 Republican presidential nominations to George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, respectively, but it was his call for a culture war that became the party’s mantra.
The second Nixon campaign alum had worked on Nixon’s television ads and campaign themes, going on to a career in right-wing media and then serving as the chief of Fox News for two decades. Roger Ailes provided a new and exponentially louder megaphone to the culture-war politics of Pat Buchanan, and later, Donald Trump. No one did more to reach out to the “whos” whose hatred the right needed to stoke if it was to win elections, and to select the “whos” who it deemed suitable objects for their hatred, even (or especially) if those “whos” were largely products of Ailes’s imagination.
Phillips went another way. Like Buchanan and Ailes, he realized that the Republicans’ reach had been extended to crucial portions of the white working class. But even as they sought to extend that reach by exploiting and triggering the racial, gender, and cultural anxieties and resentments of those voters, Phillips came to understand how working-class Americans were losing ground economically as income and wealth began being redistributed upward under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and continued that way under Bill Clinton and both presidents Bush. By the mid-1980s, he began to report on the deindustrialization of the Midwest and the financialization of corporations under pressure from a newly re-empowered Wall Street. From the late ’80s until about a dozen years ago, when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s, he authored a string of books that made many of the same points as those by such avowedly left political economists as Barry Bluestone, Ben Harrison, and Prospect co-founder Bob Kuttner.
Phillips even gave a talk at and to the AFL-CIO (beginning with an account of how, as a young lawyer, future Republican President William McKinley had represented unions in court actions). And in the late ’90s, I attended a small dinner in Los Angeles, hosted by Marxist historian Perry Anderson (the guiding spirit of New Left Review), at which the visiting Phillips was the guest of honor. The altogether friendly colloquy between Anderson and Phillips didn’t presage any kind of leftward-moving realignment, of course, but I do wish someone had recorded it so we could access it today, when Wall Street has become considerably more unpopular than it was then.
Today’s Republican Party has gone full Buchanan-Ailes, and still steers clear of the path that Phillips laid out for them, though the current Republican base—the white working class—is just as economically submerged (in some ways, more so) as it was when Phillips was writing. Occasionally, a stray GOP culture-war demagogue flirts with elements of economic, as well as racial-cultural, populism, as Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has by walking on a UAW picket line, but such instances are few and far between. More common is Donald Trump’s response to the autoworker strike, in which he’s endeavored to move workers’ economic concerns onto the more Republican-friendly turf of opposition to such woke nostrums as electrification and the ostensible climate alarmism that gives it rise.
In a sense, then, the battle for the votes of the white (and not just the white) working class, on which the 2024 presidential election will largely turn, comes down to the contest between these three Nixonians—or more precisely, between them once the post-Nixon Phillips understood the toll that Reaganomics and financialization were taking on the middle and working class. In Joe Biden, at least, the Democrats finally have a president whose economics are as progressive and pro–working class as Nixon’s onetime chief strategist’s.
