NY Times, March 19, 2006
Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the
Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In
writing “The Emerging Republican Majority” (published in 1969), he
asked a very big question about American politics: How would the
demographic and economic changes of postwar America shape the long-term
future of the two major parties? His answer, startling at the time but
now largely unquestioned, is that the movement of people and resources
from the old Northern industrial states into the South and the West (an
area he enduringly labeled the “Sun Belt”) would produce a new and more
conservative Republican majority that would dominate American politics
for decades. Phillips viewed the changes he predicted with optimism. A
stronger Republican Party, he believed, would restore stability and
order to a society experiencing disorienting and at times violent
change. Shortly before publishing his book, he joined the Nixon
administration to help advance the changes he had foreseen. [read more]