The Strange Career of Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority

In 1969, Kevin Phillips, a political strategist for Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, published a book that predicted a conservative realignment in American politics. Phillips made the case that the changing racial, demographic, and political composition of the country favored Republicans and candidly counseled them about how best to exploit these changes to build an enduring electoral majority. Phillips’ The Emerging Republican Majority created a storm of controversy when it first appeared, and over the last four decades the book has remained at the center of a spirited public and academic debate among scholars, journalists, and political pundits over the nature and origins of the Republican ascendancy. Phillips, who went on to become a leading political writer and analyst, is now widely credited with helping to design the “Southern Strategy” that enabled Republicans to capture the South. Yet Phillips’ book has long been out of print and many leading histories of the conservative movement have either ignored or minimized its influence. Phillips himself grew disaffected with the Republican right and in recent years has become one of its harshest critics. This year marks both the fortieth anniversary of the publication of The Emerging Republican Majority and the end of conservative Republican dominance in national politics that Phillip’s book heralded. At this important juncture in recent American political history, my paper will reexamine Phillip’s controversial book and trace its broader influence on scholarly and more popular understandings of the rise of the Republican right. I will pay especially close attention to the racial dimensions of Phillips’ argument and the treatment of race in the larger literature on the conservative movement. By investigating the history of The Emerging Republican Majority, I will shed new light on the role of race in the conservative Republican ascendancy and in its demise.