Divided and Conquered

By Astra Taylor

Surprise, surprise—appealing to the preferences and prejudices of swing voters did not deliver a Democratic victory. Astra Taylor explained in a recent issue why this strategy was bound to fail.

WORKING IN Richard Nixon’s polling operation in 1968, the young lawyer Kevin Phillips believed he was doing more than just studying ethnic voting patterns for the Republican presidential campaign. He was, he told the writer Garry Wills, in charge of his own specialty, which he described as “the whole secret of politics—knowing who hates who.”

The following year, after Nixon’s victory, Phillips made his reputation as a political wunderkind with The Emerging Republican Majority, an analysis of what was being called the Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy.” The key to that strategy was stoking racial enmity in the South so as to peel white voters away from the Democratic Party. “Considerable historical and theoretical evidence supports the thesis that a liberal Democratic era has ended and that a new era of consolidationist Republicanism has begun,” Phillips observed. The South had been dominated by the Democratic Party since it clung to its role as the defender of white privilege and power at the end of Reconstruction, the brief period after the Civil War when the United States government pursued the path of racial and economic equity. Democratic control could be broken and Republican rule hastened along, Phillips argued, by using issues of identity and grievance to pit populations against one another, making questions of platform and policy less central.

“Our society remains riven with sectional conflicts and group animosities that a bipartisan elite perpetuate and profit from.”

Still in his late twenties while working for Nixon’s campaign manager John Mitchell, Phillips dedicated his book to “the two principal architects” of the emerging Republican majority: Nixon and Mitchell. But Phillips was one of the architects as well. He explained how American voting patterns could be “structured and analyzed” to reveal their logic. “The best structural approach to the changing alignment of American voters,” Phillips wrote, “is a region-by-region analysis designed to unfold the multiple sectional conflicts and group animosities in a logical progression.” Racially and socially polarizing appeals, Phillips predicted, could splinter existing voting blocs and cement conservative victories for generations to come—victories animated by what he described as a spirit of “white anger and counter-solidarity.”

While the book is now regarded as prophetic, Phillips did not, of course, invent the politics of divide and conquer; indeed, a century prior, Southern plantation-owning Democrats had successfully deployed such tactics to their own benefit, defending racial hierarchy and fighting back against Reconstruction, setting the stage for the imposition of Jim Crow laws. But Phillips did help professionalize and normalize the approach. Our society remains riven with sectional conflicts and group animosities that a powerful—and bipartisan—elite perpetuate and profit from, financially and politically. They are aided in this endeavor by an array of liberal commentators who purport to be seeking more moderation in American political life but in fact are undermining the possibility of a new progressive, multiracial, small-d democratic majority.

Continue reading “Divided and Conquered,” an essay by Astra Taylor, on our site.

Subscribe

You received this email because you signed up for The Baffler’s newsletter mailing list, have a Baffler subscription, donated to our foundation, or contributed to the magazine. Want to change how you receive these emails? Update your preferences, or unsubscribe from this list. For questions about your subscription, contact Customer Care.

To ensure our email updates reach your inbox, please add newsletter@thebaffler.com to your email Address Book.