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.
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.
Right Meets Left
Nixon, of course, resigned in disgrace after Watergate. Mitchell, who had served as Nixon’s attorney general, eventually spent nineteen months in prison for his role in the scandal. For a time, Phillips took up with activists who envisioned a “New Right,” but as Ronald Reagan’s presidency catered to Country Club Republicans, and George H. W. Bush offered more of the same, Phillips soured on the GOP. In the way only former acolytes can, Phillips came to loathe the Republican Party he helped embolden and empower. In 1990’s The Politics of Rich and Poor, he eviscerated Reaganism, while 2004’s American Dynasty went after the Bush family. He wrote a book exposing the religious right and lambasted the corrosive effect of concentrated wealth on American political life. Yet he never renounced his role in creating the economically inegalitarian conditions he so vigorously despised. Instead, he penned analytical tomes and expressed reverence and nostalgia for the great (white) men of the past. Even as the evidence mounted before his eyes, Phillips never seemed to grasp how the racial resentments he had so enthusiastically enflamed had redounded to wound the very people he claimed to care about, leaving the white working class to be governed by charlatans and despots, pinned under the thumb of corporate power, and dying from deaths of despair. As Phillips saw it, the white working class had been betrayed by Reagan, by the Yale-educated George Bushes—but not by him.
Phillips dedicated his book to “the two principal architects” of the emerging Republican majority: Richard Nixon and John Mitchell.
In 2008, during the heat of the mortgage crisis, Phillips went on Democracy Now!, the long-running left-wing morning news show. Host Amy Goodman seemed to revel in the fact that her guest was a well-known Republican apostate. Phillips was there to promote his book Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism. He spoke passionately about Wall Street’s misdeeds, reckless commodity speculation, and echoed some of the standard talking points of many left-wing critics of neoliberalism: “We have a financialized economy in which we don’t make much anymore, and finance is up to 20 to 21 percent of the U.S. GDP, and manufacturing down to 12.” He waxed on about the impact on ordinary citizens, lingering on the climbing rates of household indebtedness. “The growth of finance has involved the growth of a debt and credit industry,” he argued. “More and more people are in more and more debt, and the amount of debt that individuals have and that they have to service is increasingly a burden.” Because “interest groups are so much in control of Congress,” Phillips continued, the times demanded a president brave enough to go to “the people with a serious case for reform—and some of the reform has to be reregulation of finance.”
Phillips’s remarks strike me now as prescient but also disturbingly blinkered, precisely because of his inattention to race and racism. Even in 2008, it was evident that the subprime mortgages at the center of the banking sector’s fraud were concentrated in communities of color, a continuation of a long history of racialized predatory lending. In 2009, for example, the New York Times reported that a Wells Fargo loan officer stated in an affidavit that bank employees called subprime products “ghetto loans” and called black customers “mud people.” In the words of a former employee who described herself as having been one of the bank’s top-producing subprime loan officers: “We just went right after them. Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches, because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.” The result? The crisis wiped out approximately half of the collective wealth held by black families in the United States. For Latino families, the impact was even worse. And, of course, millions of white families lost their homes, savings, and jobs. But who was blamed for the financial meltdown? The bank’s initial and most harmed casualties. And it wasn’t just conservative outlets like Fox News making accusations. Bloomberg Businessweek suggested as much in an astonishing 2013 cover illustration featuring racist cartoon caricatures of four people in different rooms of a house, variously appearing to bathe in money, feed money to their dog, or gamble with dollars like playing cards. This was the Southern Strategy adapted for a new era of financial crisis management. Its race-baiting and victim-blaming illogic supercharged the Tea Party, setting the stage for Donald Trump, who took Phillips’s divide-and-conquer methods to a whole new level.
Men at Work
It isn’t only MAGA conservatives who have imbibed Phillips’s mercenary wisdom as if by osmosis. A good number of influential liberal pundits publicly embrace positions that are as hostile to solidarity as those once promoted by the erstwhile Republican mastermind—though some would likely balk at such a comparison. Prominent figures such as New York Times contributor John McWhorter, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, Slow Boring Substacker Matthew Yglesias, and the eternally exasperated James Carville (who recently attributed Joe Biden’s unpopularity to the abundance of “preachy females” in the Democratic Party) routinely argue that elevating the concerns of marginalized groups is divisive and detrimental. Winning an imagined majority over, they insist—and specifically winning men over—involves abandoning allegedly “extreme” positions on racial, social, and economic justice. Winning elections, similarly, involves tacking to the center and appealing to what is already popular, pandering to voters’ preferences and prejudices, instead of trying to shift their perspective and expand their sense of possibility.
Phillips’s remarks on Democracy Now! were prescient but also disturbingly blinkered, precisely because of his inattention to race and racism.
While pundits pitch themselves as savvy and discerning, their aggressively middling methods only abet the divide-and-conquer reactionary strategy Phillips laid out almost six decades ago. Consider self-styled Democratic prognosticator Ruy Teixeira, a veteran of the Washington, D.C., think tank scene; in 2022, he left the liberal Center for American Progress for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Most recently, he is the coauthor, along with his longtime collaborator journalist John B. Judis, of Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. The 2023 book is a belated rebuke to their 2002 bestseller, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which was widely credited with foreseeing the coalition of professionals, women, minorities, and working-class people who elected Barack Obama, bringing the authors notoriety and credibility. Unlike Phillips’s treatise, however, their thesis has not endured. The authors are the first to admit that they were wrong. Democrats are fighting for their lives rather than coasting to victory on an unstoppable demographic wave. What happened? Their answer, in a nutshell, is wokeism. The solution? Centrism.
Where Have All the Democrats Gone? could have been an interesting attempt to reconsider past assumptions with the benefit of humbling hindsight, but humility is not a virtue the authors possess. In 2002, Judis and Teixeira approvingly observed that the coalition they foresaw reflected “the outlook of the social movements that first arose during the sixties.” With the distance of a few decades, after the activists’ insights have been fully absorbed into the mainstream and stripped of any edginess, they could appreciate the positive consequences of prior battles for racial and sexual equality. But what would they have thought at the start of those struggles, when the vast majority of Americans virulently, and often violently, opposed civil rights? The poll-based positioning they advocate for would have told those uppity feminists, queers, and antiracist clergy and organizers to simmer down, lest they alienate the vaunted center.
For all their alarm, Judis and Teixeira show very little curiosity about how the categories we currently use evolved and how they might change, or how new ones might emerge. They betray a rigid faith in the permanence of existing identity categories—a trait shared by many critics of identity politics who end up retreating back into and reaffirming essentialist conceptions of identity: indignation at movements for trans rights, for example, spurs them to uphold a traditional gender binary; anger at feminism inspires a reactive embrace of men’s rights. But the fact remains that identities are not static, as the history and evolution of the category of “worker” shows. A focus on an idealized past—a frozen and nostalgic fetish for masculine-coded manufacturing jobs—makes it impossible to fully recognize the working class now actually coming into being, which, as Tamara Draut makes clear in her book Sleeping Giant, is more female and racially diverse and disproportionately employed in service industries, which are harder to offshore than the factories of yore. Judis and Teixeira may despise the leaders of the much-maligned Squad, but they are authentic representatives of this rising and diverse working class in a Congress stuffed with millionaires—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a former bartender; Jamaal Bowman, a former school principal; Cori Bush, an ex-nurse.
With their latest work, Judis and Teixeira continue to be less interested in emerging majorities than already existing ones. Indeed, it’s the latest addition to a well-trod and wearisome genre. For as long as I’ve been politically conscious, angry men have been writing invectives about how identity politics, broadly construed, have sabotaged the fight for economic democracy and ruined the Democratic Party. (The first book I read that fit this mold, 2004’s What’s The Matter With Kansas?, by Baffler-founder Thomas Frank, was illuminating and valuable even if I disagreed with elements of its thesis; Frank’s precursors and imitators tend to be less historically insightful, less politically radical, and far less entertaining.) With varying degrees of nuance and spleen, the arguments all boil down to the same complaint: movements for racial equity, women’s rights, gay and trans liberation, immigrant justice, and environmentalism have distracted from a universalist fight for social democracy. If it wasn’t for these pesky special interest agitators, we could return to the popular New Deal liberalism of the 1930s—and win.
Smackdown Strategy
In order to return to this hallowed tradition, Democrats need to “throw the intersectional left under the bus,” as Teixeira bluntly put it in a recent blog, published in response to rising pro-Palestine sentiment. (Full disclosure: Teixeira authored a piece in May bashing my coauthored book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea for promoting “epistemic closure” because my coauthor Leah Hunt-Hendrix and I endorse intersectionality, which we see as a simple recognition that multiple oppressions overlap but which Teixeira says is a form of tribal identitarianism; if Teixeira had been epistemically open enough to actually read the book, he would know we are anti-essentialists who actually argue that understanding intersecting forms of subjugation can help us expand and transcend given identities—and can lead to a transformative solidarity.) Like other anti-left liberals, Judis and Teixeira make the case for a more siloed and restrained approach to inequities and ills: plain vanilla feminism, not the multiflavored, gender-inclusive variety, and environmentalism that focuses on the plight of polar bears instead of emphasizing socioeconomic disparities. Imagining herds of white men in hard hats flinching in disgust whenever progressive organizers seek to broaden and strengthen coalitions by linking issues, they ignore the way intersectionality already suffuses working-class spaces. No matter, for example, that the United Auto Workers is an outspoken supporter of the LGBTQ+ community and was an early proponent of a ceasefire in Gaza. As UAW president Shawn Fain made clear in a recent speech while wearing a sweatshirt bedecked in a rainbow: “We’re a union that is gonna be inclusive. . . . It’s vital that we stand up for everyone. Everyone’s fight is our fight.”
While pundits pitch themselves as savvy and discerning, their aggressively middling methods only abet the divide-and-conquer reactionary strategy Phillips laid out almost six decades ago.
Judis and Teixeira’s conception of the Democratic Party is as phantasmagoric as their nostalgic image of the working class. As they tell it, a small coterie of radical organizers, think tankers, progressive philanthropists, and Squad members currently sets the agenda on Capitol Hill, forming an unstoppable “shadow party.” In this topsy-turvy account, a handful of black academics including Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Michelle Alexander have more power than the civil rights leaders of the 1960s, and inflammatory tweets by irate activists are more influential than actual policy. As critic Ed Burmila noted, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? mentions Black Lives Matter thirty-two times, while Chuck Schumer is only name-dropped twice: “To criticize him for saying climate change is a priority and for failing to properly consider an anti-immigration bill (such a reasonable one, we’re assured!) sponsored by the authoritarian-curious Tom Cotton.” Members of the Squad are portrayed as ideologues and wreckers, no matter that it was two centrist senators, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who did all they could to scuttle Joe Biden’s signature initiatives.
Yet it’s the left, and not corporate-backed obstructionists, that Judis and Teixeira want to see publicly flogged. During an interview with a Politico podcast, they fantasized about the possibility of a modern-day Sister Souljah moment—a reference to presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s 1992 castigation of a young black political hip-hop artist for her comments after the Rodney King uprising. It was a highly contrived smackdown, with Clinton making his remarks to a conference of the Rainbow Coalition, led by Jesse Jackson. As the Washington Post reported at the time: “Clinton campaign officials had been looking for a way to break the candidate’s image among voters as a loyal supporter of Democratic orthodoxy, and a number of his key strategists argued that a confrontation with Jackson was the best mechanism to achieve that goal.” In reality, Biden regularly grants Judis and Teixeira their wish, swatting away progressive ambitions to display his centrist bona fides. Recall Biden’s 2022 State of the Union address, when the country was still reeling from the massive protests following the police murder of George Floyd. “The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them,” he intoned. Accordingly, police budgets around the country went up, not down. And yet, for Judis and Teixeira, the intersectional left remains all-powerful, even when its slogans are mocked and recommendations scorned.
This hatred for the left overpowers a levelheaded appreciation of strategy. Judis and Teixeira praise Biden for the more liberal aspects of his economic agenda, from the reviving of industrial policy to the executive branch’s more labor-friendly posture. As they grudgingly and fleetingly acknowledge, Biden only moved in these directions because he was under pressure from his left. In the 2020 primary, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the coalitions they represented pushed Biden to make a range of progressive commitments. At the same time, AOC’s high-profile campaign for a “Green New Deal,” backed up by the grassroots mobilizing of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, helped create the conditions that made the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (with billions in funding for clean energy) possible. Even as Judis and Teixeira cheer the resurgence of the labor movement, they cannot acknowledge the broader context. The rising left currents of the past decade have influenced scores of younger people to organize at Starbucks, Amazon, on college campuses, and beyond, while also inspiring them to speak out—in their capacity as unionized workers—on a range of issues, from the cancellation of student debt, to racial justice, to peace in Gaza.
Does this mean we shouldn’t be concerned with the fact that a good number of working-class people—including a not-insignificant growing number of black and Latino men—are defecting not only to the Republican Party but to its far-right wing? Of course not. But we won’t win them over, let alone win elections, by excommunicating key constituencies of the current Democratic coalition while simultaneously appealing to the purported biases of ever-elusive swing voters or the retrograde grievances of people discomfited by progress. Like other pundits of their ilk, Judis and Teixeira counsel tacking right on climate and immigration, with the presumption that a considerable swath of the electorate sits ready to break for the Democrats if only they were less aggressive about transitioning to renewable energy and was more openly hostile to migrants. Sadly, it’s a tactic Democrats have tried time and again, as they proudly turn away asylum seekers and open up public lands for drilling. In reality, all this approach does is alienate the Democratic base while signaling to conservatives that they are right to be fixated on border security or to revel in their dependence on fossil fuels. A 2024 analysis of European electoral and polling data confirmed as much: adopting right-wing policies on issues such as immigration and the economy is not a winning strategy. And it makes sense. Why cast a ballot for the half-hearted imitator when you can pull the lever for the real, red-blooded thing?
The Road from Serfdom
During the 2016 Democratic primary, when Sanders was still a contender, Hillary Clinton enraged many progressives and leftists—including me—when she made now notorious remarks targeted at Sanders and his supporters: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow—and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will—would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” These rhetorical questions were upsettingly cynical, a way to paint the Sanders coalition as insensitive to the reality of discrimination, as well as a way to deflect from Clinton’s long and deep ties to Wall Street.
The moment also stuck in Teixeira’s craw. In his view, Clinton’s invocation of identity was nothing but a distraction from the need for economic reform, and he’s not wrong. But it’s worth posing Clinton’s question in a different way. If we stopped talking about racism, sexism, the LGBT community, and immigrants, would that mean we could finally break up the banks?
Consider me dubious. In 2011, I helped found the Debt Collective, an experimental union of debtors I still organize with today. In some ways, we have built a movement around the very problems Kevin Phillips sounded the alarm about on Democracy Now! years ago. The financial sector was well organized, always able to successfully lobby the federal government to advance their interests. Why shouldn’t the millions of ordinary people driven into unpayable debt by elite greed attempt to do the same? If nothing else, my years of economic justice activism have taught me that we cannot simply bypass issues of identity. The transformative power of debtor organizing comes from the fact that hundreds of millions of people from all walks of life are struggling to make their monthly payments—but debt also affects people differently, as the subprime mortgage crisis revealed. Today, to give but one example, black women are often disproportionately burdened by student and payday loans, as the result of wage discrimination and a lack of intergenerational wealth. Building solidarity—bonds of concern and commitment that connect us across our myriad differences—requires acknowledging we are different to begin with, and differentially treated in a still profoundly stratified society. Denying this fact hardly breaks out of the identity bind; to the contrary, pat “color-blind” universalism too often relies on and reaffirms an essentializing reactionary conception of white masculinity.
Breaking up the banks, like any number of progressive victories, will take a tremendous amount of organizing might—strength we can only build by forging an inclusive, multiracial, class-conscious movement. We can either do the hard work required to create this emerging democratic (not simply Democratic Party) majority or submit to an increasingly rabid, antidemocratic, authoritarian minority, one eager to impose its unhinged agenda through all the advantages granted to them by the American political system: the popular vote-sabotaging Electoral College, the autocratic Supreme Court, the malapportioned Senate and Congress, a Bill of Rights that doesn’t include the affirmative right to cast a ballot. The architects of the American constitution wanted to ensure the continued class, race, and gender dominance of men like themselves. Phillips’s Southern Strategy didn’t work because it was novel but because it built on the methods of the past.
Phillips passed away last year at eighty-two. Given the coldhearted and calculating way he wrote about manipulating grievance and enmity for political gain as a young man, I’m not particularly surprised he never had a moral awakening. But I’m still struck by his lack of a strategic one. Despite his indignation about the United States’ descent into a new gilded age, Phillips never examined his own role as a tactician for those who worship the market forces he claimed to abhor, nor did he recognize that restraining those forces required repairing the social fabric he had once diligently worked to fray. He could not comprehend that fighting racism was an essential tactic for combating the greed and rot his later books exposed in gory detail; that we can only combat the “counter-solidarity” he cynically invoked with the active cultivation of real, transformative solidarity. The conscious forging of bonds across social divisions—especially, but not only, racial ones—is the only way to create a political majority actually worth building.
This essay was partially adapted with permission from Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix, published by Pantheon Books.