A Bad Person Who Was Bad

I didn’t write an obituary for Kevin Phillips, largely because I think I forgot he was alive, but he was a very bad person.

Kevin Phillips, a self-taught ethnographer whose groundbreaking findings in the mid-1960s heralded what he called an “emerging Republican majority” in national politics, based on a so-called Southern strategy that would help the party win five of the next six presidential elections, died on Monday in Naples, Fla. He was 82.

His wife, Martha Phillips, said the cause of death, in a hospice near his home, was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. Phillips was in his late 20s when he published his first book, “The Emerging Republican Majority” (1969), which, refining earlier studies he had done, predicted a rightward realignment in national politics driven by ethnic and racial divisions and white discontent.

With that book, he emerged as an influential, if controversial, conservative theoretician. (He called himself a “political analyst,” not a strategist.) He would be credited with predicting and even masterminding the Southern strategy, which in large part enabled Richard M. Nixon to narrowly win the presidency in 1968 by appealing to the grievances of white voters in the South who had historically voted for Democrats. (Nixon said he did not read the book until after the election.)

“All the talk about Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage,” Mr. Phillips wrote.

In what many considered a cynical calculation, he recommended that Republicans not dilute the Voting Rights Act because “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”

“That’s where the votes are,” he added. “Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”

“The whole secret of politics,” he told the journalist Garry Wills during the 1968 presidential campaign, “is knowing who hates who.”

Well, he and Nixon certainly perfected that.

Somewhat amusingly, Phillips’ politics shifted toward a broad anti-corporate populism in recent years, as he realized that income inequality is a bad thing. Well, that’s fine and all, but let’s just say it hardly put a dent into the great damage he caused this nation.