The Emerging Republican Majority: Updated Edition (The James Madison Library in American Politics) - Softcover

Phillips, Kevin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691163243 ISBN 13: 9780691163246

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

One of the most important and controversial books in modern American politics, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) explained how Richard Nixon won the White House in 1968—and why the Republicans would go on to dominate presidential politics for the next quarter century. Rightly or wrongly, the book has widely been seen as a blueprint for how Republicans, using the so-called Southern Strategy, could build a durable winning coalition in presidential elections. Certainly, Nixon's election marked the end of a "New Deal Democratic hegemony" and the beginning of a conservative realignment encompassing historically Democratic voters from the South and the Florida-to-California "Sun Belt," in the book’s enduring coinage. In accounting for that shift, Kevin Phillips showed how two decades and more of social and political changes had created enormous opportunities for a resurgent conservative Republican Party. For this new edition, Phillips has written a preface describing his view of the book, its reception, and how its analysis was borne out in subsequent elections.

A work whose legacy and influence are still fiercely debated, The Emerging Republican Majority is essential reading for anyone interested in American politics or history.

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Kevin Phillips is a writer and political commentator. He is the author of fifteen books, including, most recently, 1775, Bad Money, American Theocracy, and American Dynasty.

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The Emerging Republican Majority

By Kevin Phillips

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Kevin P. Phillips
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16324-6

Contents

General Editor's Introduction by Sean Wilentz, ix, 
Preface to the Princeton University Press edition, xv, 
Preface to the 1970 paperback edition, xxi, 
I. Introduction, 1, 
II. The Northeast, 23, 
A. Northeast Sociopolitical Voting Streams, 72, 
1. The Establishment, 73, 
2. The Yankees, 86, 
3. The Negroes, 100, 
4. The Jews, 108, 
5. The Non- Yankee Northeast, 121, 
6. The Catholics, 144, 
7. Suburbia, 188, 
B. The Northeastern Future, 200, 
III. The South, 204, 
A. The Deep South, 228, 
1. The Black Belt, 234, 
2. Dixie Upcountry, 259, 
3. French Louisiana, 267, 
B. The Outer South, 272, 
1. The Southern Mountains, 282, 
2. The Piedmont, 293, 
3. The Black Belts, 302, 
4. The New Urban Florida and Texas, 307, 
5. The Southern Plains, 316, 
6. The Latin Crescent, 320, 
C. The Future of Southern Politics, 325, 
IV. The Heartland, 330, 
A. The Border, 338, 
B. The Great Lakes, 378, 
C. The Farm States, 410, 
D. The Mountain States, 452, 
E. A United Heartland, 472, 
V. The Pacific States, 477, 
A. The Northern Pacific Coast, 491, 
B. Southern California, 505, 
1. The Sun Belt Phenomenon, 507, 
2. The Rise of Southern California, 515, 
C. The Pacific Interior, 527, 
D. The Pacific Future, 537, 
VI. The Future of American Politics, 539, 
Index, 557, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Far from being the tenuous and unmeaningful victory suggested by critical observers, the election of Richard M. Nixon as President of the United States in November, 1968, bespoke the end of the New Deal Democratic hegemony and the beginning of a new era in American politics. To begin with, Nixon was elected by a Republican Party much changed from that deposed in 1932; and such party metamorphosis has historically brought a fresh political cycle in its wake. Secondly, the vastness of the tide (57 per cent) which overwhelmed Democratic liberalism—George Wallace's support was clearly an even more vehement protest against the Democrats than was Nixon's vote—represented an epochal shifting of national gears from the 61 per cent of the country's ballots garnered in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson. This repudiation visited upon the Democratic Party for its ambitious social programming, and inability to handle the urban and Negro revolutions, was comparable in scope to that given conservative Republicanism in 1932 for its failure to cope with the economic crisis of the Depression. And ironically, the Democratic debacle of 1968 followed the Party's most smashing victory—that of 1964—just as the 1932 toppling of the Grand Old Party succeeded the great landslide of 1928. A comparison of the two reversals is apt:

The changed makeup and outlook of the GOP reflects its switchover, during the 1932–68 span of the New Deal era, from orientation towards the establishmentarian Northeast—especially the Yankee and industrial bailiwicks of New England, upstate New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania—to representation of the rising insurgency of the South, the West, the New York City Irish and middle-class suburbia. At the same time, while the New Deal institutionalized into a nationally-dominant liberal Establishment, the Democratic power base shifted to the Northeast, historically the seat of America's dominant economic, social, cultural and political elite. By 1964, the transition was reasonably obvious; whatever the strategic ineptitude of the Goldwater candidacy, it was not a geopolitical fluke. As Chart 2 shows, the Republican Party had been moving its reliance South and West since the beginning of the New Deal cycle in 1932. The 1968 election confirmed the general Southern and Western impetus of 1964—only the Deep South parochialism had been an aberration—and set a cyclical seal on the partisan re-alignment.

Maps 1–4 illustrate the regional tides at work and Chart 3 estimates the group voting currents of 1960–68. In 1968, only six states and the District of Columbia gave the Democratic presidential nominee a majority of the vote; seven other states produced Humphrey pluralities in the face of Nixon-Wallace majorities. In thirty-seven other states, Nixon-Wallace majorities divided in such a way as to award victory to either the Republican candidate, who carried thirty-two states, or Wallace, who carried five. Most of the Democratic states were Northeastern—Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland (as well as the District of Columbia)—or (West Virginia excluded) they were states—Michigan, Minnesota, Washington and Hawaii—which had been heavily settled or influenced by Yankees or Scandinavians. In light of its concentration in an area which had been the prime sociological core of post-Civil War Republicanism, 1968 Democratic strength was peculiarly ironic.

The forces shaping this parochialism are clear enough; they explain why, even as 1968 saw the nation turning against the Democrats, a handful of the New England and above-mentioned states swam against the current and gave the Democrats a higher vote share than in 1960. First of all, no other part of the United States shares the historical penchant of the Northeast for supporting the politics and ideology of a hitherto nationally dominant, but fading, group of interests. The Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and New Deal upheavals all captured the White House against ballot opposition centered in the Northeast. And on top of growing national Democratic Party identification with Northeastern interests, another major fulcrum of 1968 upheaval was the erosion of Civil War political traditions which had been the source of American sectional politics and partisanship for a century. Because of loyalties formed in the crucible of slavery and civil war, Yankees and Scandinavians in New England, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and the Pacific Northwest were the driving force and numerical bulwark of a Republican Party they had principally created. But as a result of the social upheaval of the Nineteen-Sixties, these were the groups and states among whom and which the Democrats gained (or suffered only minimal losses) in 1968. In many of the same areas where the Civil War had ingrained the most intense Republicanism, Democratic identification with the Negro social and economic revolution precipitated that party's best gains a century later.

On the other side of the coin, the conservative and Republican alliance of 1968 mobilized in areas with an insurgent record—the South, the West and the Irish sidewalks of New York (as well as the emerging tax-revolt centers of middle-class suburbia)—and a record of support for popular movements like those of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These voting streams were inclined to move away from, rather than towards, the emerging Negro-Establishment entente; and harkening back to the Civil War, the new conservatism was generally taking shape (there were exceptions, of course) in areas where Civil War feeling had been secessionist, divided or ambiguous, as in the South, Heartland, West, Border and German-Irish urban centers. Persistent ethnicultural cleavages were prompting a turnabout of partisanship.

But at this point it...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691163243
• ISBN 13: 9780691163246
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 570
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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