Books, Arts & Manners: Road Map to the Future

The Emerging Republican Majority By Kevin P. Phillips Arlington House, $7.95 Were my experience in these matters somewhat wider, I would start by saying Kevin Phillips has written the most important political book in the generation. As it is, I shall try a more modest beginning. He has written, quite simply, the best such book that I have ever read. If our politicians have their wits about them, it should rapidly become a landmark of political analysis. Phillips’ work is doubly remarkable, as noteworthy for its massive documenta_ tion as for its revolutionary message. Alongside its rows of census data, its array _ of ethnic, religious and economic fact, its charts and maps and recurring syntheses of all these ingredients, the work of the conventional soothsayers looks somehow thin and unsubstantial. Even more to the point, perhaps, the existing wisdom seems by comparison hopelessly out of date. On Phillips’ showing, the old assumptions are no longer valid; new ones must take their place. The Emerging Republican Majority argues, in a nutshell, that the liberal era in America is over, that political power is slipping from the grasp of an enfeebled Eastern establishment and _ its ideological allies. Taking its place as the leading factor in our politics is a new constellation of voting groups, whose sympathies are moving to the tight and whose seats of power are the “heartland” of Midwest and Plains, the South, the Border and the West. The strength of this coalition is seen most Clearly in the shift of population westward and the enormous enlargement of the suburbs, .although it is becoming evident in certain areas of the major industrial cities as well. Phillips views the 1968 election, in _ Which 57 per cent of the total vote was cast for either Richard Nixon or George Wallace, as a breakthrough for this new Political impulse—‘the end of the New Deal Democratic hegemony and the beginning of a new era in American politics.” The new era, he says, will be conServative and thus in all likelihood RePublican. (In this respect, it might be added, the author is something more than an academic authority, having helped compile the data on which the Successful Nixon campaign was based. His expertise is neither cloistered nor _ Simply retrospective.) Support for Nixon and Wallace, Phillips shows, came from a broad alliance of blue-collar-to-upper-middle-class voters who want a slowdown of government spending, taxes, controls, social experimentation and welfare schemes, and who think the authorities should pay more attention to the task of maintaining the peace against outbreaks of violence. They resent and will vote against the manipulative state. Opposing them are the well-to-do establishmentarian elite and the very poor—in essence, the manipulators and those who are being most systematically manipulated. Since the middle class is booming, all the signs suggest continued increase in the ballot strength of those who want the manipulations to stop. To align itself with this rising force, Phillips argues, the Republican Party should hew to a position of responsible conservatism and prevent outflanking maneuvers to its right. The Wallace vote of ’68 was, the author asserts, a transitional phenomenon, consisting chiefly of disgruntled Southern, Border and urban Democrats leaving their traditional party. Their natural future home is in a conservative GOP. Phillips sees recent political trends as a vast swapping of ideological positions —the former “Yankee” stalwarts of the Republican Party moving toward the Democrats, more recent immigrant groups and other elements who formed the bulwark of the Democratic Party — going in the opposite direction. Most — important, population blocs whose voting habits were determined for a century by the allegiances of the Civil War are now breaking out of this antiquated pattern and forming new loyalties. Phillips suggests the 1964 Goldwater campaign was decisive in this transposition of factors, and that last year’s Nixon victory completed the work Goldwater had begun. Desertion of the GOP by various upper-class voters in well-to-do Eastern communities was viewed as a major calamity for the party when it occurred. But Phillips contends this step was nec_ essary if the party was to open itself up — to the burgeoning energies of the South, the West and the middle-class suburbs. He believes the elections of 1966 and 1968 in large measure accomplished this, and that the GOP is now well on its way toward becoming the accepted spokesman for the rising conservative majority. IN THE COURSE of this demonstration, Phillips annihilates the liberal argument that “urbanization” requires a leftward policy for the Republican Party. He shows that the central city vote in the liberal areas has fallen drastically in the last three Presidential elections, while the suburban vote has moved consis- — tently upward. He cites figures from the National Commission on Urban Problems, which indicate that by 1985 the suburban population will be almost twice as large as the central city population (112.5 million to 65.5 million). Moreover, he notes, many groups within the central cities—such as the Irishand Italian-Americans—have turned in- © creasingly to the right. For liberals who admit the suburban thrust but argue that the suburbs themselves are somehow congenial to the ‘Left (an argument brought forward from time to time by the Ripon Society), Phillips has some equally crush_ ing figures at the ready. In an extensive comparison of the data, he shows that suburban liberalism in a smattering of _ “silk-stocking” areas, principally in the _ East, has been “dwarfed by the con_ servative trend of the vast new tracts of middle-class suburbia.” The bulk of the _ suburban population is conservative and is likely to get more so. These few lines can only suggest the “major themes of the Phillips book, which is a vast mosaic of information on almost every aspect of our politics. _ Suffice it to say the volume should be _ read by anyone who is interested in the _ American electoral process and wants a glimpse of the political terrain that lies ahead.