Son of the Emerging Republican Majority

The last dozen or so years, from the end of the Johnson Administration until now, saw many political upheavals; but the most important of these was, arguably, a phantom, an upheaval that never occurred—the transfer of political momentum and power from a liberal Democratic Party to a conservative Republican one. Conservative political strategists plotting the next dozen years must understand this shift manqué, the transfer that never was.

It didn’t fail for lack of talk. Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) showed how the Nixon and Wallace votes of the last election could be fused into a new governing coalition. Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg responded (in The Real Majority, 1970) with an assertion of the healthiness of the political status quo. William Rusher’s The Making of the New Majority Party, written in the ashes of Watergate, saw hope still for the new coalition, but only if its partisans forsook the GOP and founded a new party of their own. “I intended,” recalled Richard Nixon in his Memoirs, “to revitalize the Republican Party along New Majority lines.”

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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The last dozen or so years, from the end of the Johnson Administration until now, saw many political upheavals; but the most important of these was, arguably, a phantom, an upheaval that never occurred—the transfer of political momentum and power from a liberal Democratic Party to a conservative Republican one. Conservative political strategists plotting the next dozen years must understand this shift manqué, the transfer that never was.

It didn’t fail for lack of talk. Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) showed how the Nixon and Wallace votes of the last election could be fused into a new governing coalition. Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg responded (in The Real Majority, 1970) with an assertion of the healthiness of the political status quo. William Rusher’s The Making of the New Majority Party, written in the ashes of Watergate, saw hope still for the new coalition, but only if its partisans forsook the GOP and founded a new party of their own. “I intended,” recalled Richard Nixon in his Memoirs, “to revitalize the Republican Party along New Majority lines.”