On the death of Kevin Phillips
Phillips was controversial because he will be remembered foremost for his identification with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”
Although Kevin Phillips’s death has not made much of a splash in the circles of the chattering classes, he was a hugely influential and controversial Republican strategist in his time, eventually bucking the two party system altogether. Born in the Bronx of Scotch-Irish origins, he ultimately escaped the hereditary gravitational pull of the Republican party. Although a creature the Establishment after college and after working in the White House, he never stopped being skeptical of what his political tribe was doing to the country. And while he was quiet in the last few years of his life (more of which, later), Phillips was something of a gadfly to the Clinton, Bush the Younger and Obama administrations. He was as even more critical in later years of Republicans — neoconservatives in particularly — than he was of civil rights. In fact, the strategic critique of civil rights, from which he made his bones as a young man, disappeared as a political concern as he grew older and, one would suspect, wiser.
I say Phillips was controversial because he will be remembered foremost for his identification with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” While Phillips did not create it, as is largely assumed, he was the most ethnographically systematic in explaining the phenomenon in the public arena and thereafter became one with the concept. “Phillips’s 1969 book, ‘The Emerging Republican Majority,’ provided the blueprint for the ‘southern strategy’ that the Republican Party adopted for decades to win over White voters who were alienated by the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s,”is how Greg Sargent began his Op-Ed on the death of Phillips.
That cynical, divisive book explained Nixon’s 1968 victory and presaged the rise of white, Republican, working class populism that would follow into the next millennium. We are still struggling with this internationalist populist cloud, hanging, menacingly, over the planet. "The whole secret of politics,” Phillips told Garry Wills during the 1968 presidential campaign, “is knowing who hates who.” Historian Nicole Hemmer summed it up the political exploitation quite nicely in the Washington Post:
His big contribution was the idea that White southerners could be potential voters for the GOP, because the solid Democratic South had become newly fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
Phillips argued that the Republican Party needed to change the way it conducted politics to reach out to disaffected White southerners. For Nixon, that was “law and order,” something Ronald Reagan used to great effect along with stories about “welfare queens.” George H.W. Bush’s campaign ran the “Willie Horton” ad, which played up fears of Black criminality.
And of course Trump picked up on this argument. For, how could Trump not be at the intersection of politics and grievance? Historian Kevin Kruse observed:
Phillips, of course, proved correct about the regional realignment. Republicans won every single state in the South in the 1972, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. Today, Republicans dominate the region partly because they still employ Phillips’s polarizing politics of resentment and reaction, from complaints about Black Lives Matter to panics about “woke” education. Donald Trump’s continued dominance of the GOP shows that the underlying instinct to exploit division and inflame hatred remains.
It is more than just ethnography, after all — it is instinct, albeit lower, in man. And therein lies the inherent “power” of the argument, its enduring appeal. If Democrats speak to the head (and sometimes, ideally, to the heart), Republicans — thanks, in part, to strategists like Phillips — articulate clearly to the instinct, to the guts, of perceived white racial self-preservation. And what is more of a core, elemental issue to man than the ancient tribal preservation instinct? The “law and order” argument was on full, frightening display during the midterms and is at present being fashionably repurposed to “accommodate” the migrant crisis in ‘24. You can also see it on Fox News — of Ailes and beyond — and in the Murdoch media’s newer, ever more tribal white supremacist competitors. Future Republicans Presidential candidates, no doubt, will summon the ghosts of Kevin Phillips past, with gusto.
After working briefly for the Nixon administration, he became a commentator and syndicated columnist at surprisingly Establishmentarian shops like the Los Angeles Times and NPR, Harper’s and Time. As the years went by, he wrote big books cynical about the direction of the Republican Party. Sam Roberts of the Times eulogized:
The author of 15 books, a number of which made the best-seller lists, he would popularize the term “New Right” — to distinguish “populists” like Ronald Reagan and George C. Wallace from “elitists” like Nelson A. Rockefeller, Gerald R. Ford and William F. Buckley Jr. — and coin the term “Sun Belt,” for the states from Florida to California. As destinations for many migrating white ethnic Democrats, those states, in his view, were ripe for Republican gains.
He had always been more Pat Buchanan than Bill Buckley; more populist than sailboat owning elitist. But by the turn of the millennium, after the end of the Cold War dismantled conservative coalitions, he had soured against the Republicans. “I don’t think the Republicans stand for much of anything, so maybe they’re better off defining themselves as against,” he told Minn Post in 2009. “That’s one thing the Republicans are better at than some.” The Persian Gulf Wars, really and truly, rattled paleocons like Kevin Phillips as they did many other Americans on the left, at the time. The sheer audacity of Bush the Younger’s unilateralism alighted Kevin’s populist, Jacksonian cores into protest.
And protest he did — through the pen. As a result, Phillips wrote quite a bit about the Bush family and their connections -- through Dubya and Cheney -- to the House of Saud, another bête noir of his. Again from the obituary by Sam Roberts:
Among Mr. Phillips’s other best sellers was “Wealth and Democracy” (2002), an indictment of Reagan administration policies that he said induced income inequality and represented “a plutographic revolution comparable to that of the late 19th century.” In his jeremiad “American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush” (2004), he accused both President George Bush and his son President George W. Bush of “favoritism toward the energy sector, defense industries, the Pentagon and the C.I.A., as well as insistence on tax breaks for the investor class and upper-income groups.”
I remember reading some of Phillips’s late populist writings and he just could not come around to endorsing Obama when he ran, in 2008, despite his boiling anger against the Bush family and how, in his formulation, they had dragged us deep, deep into neoconservative, distracting Middle East wars. Phillips was very dismissive of Obama's green initiatives, even as he hated American dependence on the Middle East for oil. Jacksonian ‘til the end; but to his credit, Phillips was willing to suspend judgement against America’s first African-American President, at least until the Cabinet began to fill with up with the Establishment regulars: Summers and Geithner. And then Obama turned out to be just another servant of the investor class.
For someone so preternaturally skeptical and grim about the trajectory of the country, he could also be quite funny. ”I don’t take him seriously,” he said of Rick Perry. “He’s from some family in Texas that had too much money relative to their thought process.” And, quite a bit darker: “And it's terrific to be able to have a fund raiser from Merrill Lynch or Goldman Sachs or Bear Stearns that turns in $400,000 when you've got a rough political situation,” he told Frontline in 1996. “ … We now have a Secretary of the Treasury who's the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. He was an arbitrator during the 1980's. This element in Wall Street and finance have more political power at this point in the United States than they had in the 20's or in the 1890's.”
His last great cause was a populism that seemed to transcend the racialized, tribal politics of his misspent youth — the over-financialization of America. By the end of the first decade of the millennium, his subjects were debt, financial recklessness, and the growing cost and scarcity of oil. His enemies were no longer New Deal Democrats that had aligned themselves with the civil rights movement, believing in the equality of all men, but investment bankers, hedge funders and VCs. He was on a mission! He wrote, then, of The Great Recession, which Obama had inherited from the unfinanced Bush Wars in the Middle East and the great gifts to the financial sector:
By 2006, the ‘finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector, its components mixed together like linguine by the 1999 repeal of the old New Deal restraints against mergers of commercial banks, investment firms and insurance, had ballooned to 20.6% of U.S. GDP versus just 12% for manufacturing. The FIRE Sector, now calling itself the Financial Services Sector, lopsidedly dominated the private economy.
It is unfortunately that Phillips never quite got a wide enough audience for these very powerful — dare I say, leftist? — critiques against the global financial system. He came, at the end, a full 180 degrees from his launching point in right-wing populist Jacksonian American politics. It seems that this — and not the cynical, opportunistic critique against civil rights movement — was the battle that this Bronx-born, Bronx High School of Science graduate was built to fight. At least for as few decades more. But he was human, all too human. The tribulations of the flesh intervened, in the form of Alzheimer’s and death at the age of 82.
RIP, Kevin Phillips.
“This weekend in Israel, a far-right Islamist group perpetrated the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, murdering entire families, including babies, in their beds and slaughtering 260 concertgoers. More than 1,000 Israelis were killed in all, and over 100 others taken hostage. Israel’s far-right government predictably responded by choking off all food, electricity, and fuel to Gaza’s 2 million residents and then preparing a military assault more untempered by concern for civilian casualties than ever before. Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, made the brutality of what is to come plain on Monday, saying, ‘We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.’ And no small number of supposed leftists found in all this cause for celebration. Others, meanwhile, loudly refused to condemn Hamas’s atrocities, insisting it was not their place to decry the ‘military strategy’ or ‘violent resistance’ of oppressed Palestinians. In my view, these responses constitute a betrayal of the left’s most fundamental values. Either one upholds the equal worth of all human lives, opposes war crimes, and despises far-right ethno-nationalist political projects or one doesn’t.” (Eric Levitz/Intelligencer)
“There is no contradiction between reviling terrorism and tackling its roots. Both the following statements are true: Hamas has plumbed new depths of bestial cruelty; Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel has starved non-violent Palestinian alternatives. Joe Biden movingly expressed his anger at the first on Tuesday. He has not publicly acknowledged the second. The world must hope — but cannot assume — that he also made it clear to Netanyahu that he will strongly oppose the collective punishment of Palestinians. The danger to America in Israel’s response is acute. Besides the risk of a Middle East conflagration, the US will be blamed around the world for any excesses by the Israel Defense Forces. For years, Washington has turned a blind eye to Netanyahu’s serial breaking of the Oslo accords. New settlements in the occupied territories, expansion of old ones and the undercutting of the Palestinian Authority have humiliated moderate Palestinians and exposed Washington as a one-sided broker.” (Edward Luce/FT)
“Trump did not consider Sen. Ted Cruz, who ran second in the primaries. Hillary Clinton chose Kaine without giving serious consideration to her primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders. A few other same-year rivals have received serious consideration but, as this partial account indicates, recent major party presidential nominees rarely have even included same-year rivals on their vice presidential shortlists. Varying factors account for the tendency of presidential nominees not to choose those they defeat. Lingering acrimony from the campaign sometimes explains the reluctance, perhaps coupled with the awkwardness of having a running mate whose attacks might be prominently featured by the rival ticket. Such factors probably contributed to Ford’s failure to consider Reagan in 1976, George H.W. Bush passing on Dole and Kemp in 1988, and George W. Bush not considering McCain in 2000. Yet Kennedy chose Johnson and Reagan chose Bush despite such baggage.” (SabatosCrystalBall)
“Inside the Gaza Strip, a narrow sliver of the world that even in ordinary times poses logistical challenges for journalists, security conditions have quickly deteriorated. Israel is carrying out a sustained campaign of retaliatory airstrikes with the aim of decimating Hamas, and the terror group continues to launch a barrage of attacks on the Jewish state. In the days ahead, the situation is only slated to get worse, with Israel amassing troops near the border, signaling a possible ground incursion. Chronicling it all from ground zero are the few journalists located inside Gaza, providing the world with a critical first-hand account of the deteriorating humanitarian reality. Only a handful of news organizations have personnel deployed to the sealed off Palestinian territory, given the perilous conditions that define the roughly 150 square miles of narrow land. And for them, the risk is at all-time highs. Already, at least seven journalists have been killed since the onset of the war.” (Oliver Darcy/Reliable Sources)