Kevin Phillips — RIP
The author of hard right Republican strategy put racism, division, and ‘red meat’ issues at the heart of campaigns
“The whole secret of politics knowing who hates who.” — Kevin Phillips
Kevin Phillips died on Oct. 9 at age 82. Phillips is credited with Nixon’s Southern strategy which is described in his Washington Post obituary as follows:
The idea, in essence, was to co-opt White Democrats by associating African Americans with the Democratic Party. “The more Negros who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans,” Mr. Phillips told the New York Times. “That’s where the votes are.”
Phillips went on to become a critic of the Republican Party, not specifically because of racism but because of its betrayal of the middle class. I stumbled on his work in 1990, when the powers that be were writing off the American middle class. His book, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (1990), was about precisely that — how Reagan-era policies were creating a widening income gap. He followed up in 1993 with Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans, and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity.
