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May 11, 2009
Exclusive: The Emerging Republican Majority – 40 Years Later
I remember the excitement that greeted the publication of The Emerging Republican Majority by Kevin Phillips in 1969. I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois. The Nixon campaign the previous year had been my first experience as a political activist. It changed my life. Within the year my academic major would shift from engineering to history. I have never voted for anyone who was not a Republican.
The prophecy of a Republican majority was based on holding bastions in the South, Plains and Mountain States. The GOP would then win the battleground states of California and major parts of the Ohio-Mississippi and Upper Mississippi valleys in the Midwest. Phillips argued “California…is becoming more Republican than the nation as a whole in response to the middle class population explosion of Southern California.” He thought that the Midwest would go mainly GOP because of the “growing white urban Catholic conservatism from Cleveland to St. Louis.” He also thought Iowa and Wisconsin would go Republican. Phillips did not see Pennsylvania going Republican, but believed there was a chance the party could win in the battleground states of New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. Phillips’ treatise would spawn the “southern strategy” which, forty years later, is the only part of the plan that has held up.
The key for Phillips was middle class and social conservative values, the very factors that “moderate” and liberal critics have called on the party to abandon. When Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter defected to the Democrats last month, he blamed “social conservatives” in the GOP who he claimed had made “no bones about their willingness to lose the general election if they can purify the party.” Yet, it was not social issues that drove the 2008 election, but the collapsing economy. Of the three legs of the GOP stool, social conservatives and national security hawks have been far more loyal and reliable assets to the party than the business leg which has often betrayed the nation and the middle class.
The two Reagan landslides looked like the perfect fulfillment of the Phillips strategy of adding the South to traditional GOP bastions and then sweeping the battleground states. But it has all been downhill since 1988 when George H. W. Bush held most of the Reagan territory for the last time.
In 2008, GOP Presidential candidate John McCain lost the entire Pacific Coast, two of the bastion states of the West (New Mexico and Colorado), all the Midwest battleground states except Missouri, Kentucky and West Virginia, and the bastion Southern states of Virginia and Florida. In 2006, President George W. Bush had managed to win re-election by hanging on to Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Florida, Virginia, New Mexico, and Colorado, though he lost the rest of the Midwest.
Democratic President Bill Clinton won two terms by sweeping all the Midwest battleground states except Indiana, and picking off some of the western GOP bastion states (including Arizona and Nevada in 1996) as well as holding the entire Pacific Coast. He also won Florida in 1996 and Georgia in 1992. In both elections, he won the GOP bastion states of Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee.
Two policies that the Republican leadership has embraced have been largely responsible for the collapse of the majority laid out by Phillips forty years ago. An open borders attitude towards low wage immigration and manufactured imports changed the demographic trend in California and undermined living standards in the industrial heartland. GOP presidential candidates no longer even bother to campaign in California, the largest state in the union. And the loss of millions of jobs associated with manufacturing has devastated Midwest communities, breeding the kind of economic insecurity that the Democrats love to exploit.
Sen. John McCain perfectly represented the views of the Republican leadership in 2008. He was a spokesman for both amnesty for illegal aliens (who would then vote for Democrats) and free trade, which would further alienate voters in the Midwest, including former Reagan Democrats. Indeed, McCain is so extreme on the “free” trade issue that he has called for the manufacture of weapons for the U.S. military to be moved overseas and for stimulus funds to be used to buy foreign products. The McCain campaign embraced the interests of the transnational business community while dumping on social conservatives. Despite being shunned, social conservatives still joined with the national security hawks in voting for McCain as the lesser evil. It was the abject failure and incompetency of the transnational business elite that doomed the Republican effort as economic policy became the central issue of the campaign.
Phillips saw the danger looming in his 1984 book Staying on Top: The Business Case for a National Industrial Strategy. He advocated a more ''aggressive'' trade policy to force open foreign markets on a truly reciprocal basis. The 1984 trade deficit was $123.3 billion, but there was still hope that an increase in exports could bring the account into balance. But by the time the trade deficit topped the incredible figure of $700 billion in 2005, it had become clear that balance could be reached only by reducing imports.
Phillips endorsed “economic nationalism” noting that such a theme was necessary to combat what he saw as ''a parochialization of loyalties'' across a wide spectrum of values - economic, ethnic, racial and regional that could pull the country apart. Phillips was returning to the idea of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton who argued for a policy that would draw the north and south together as each other’s best customers, rather than risk overseas trade patterns that could create ties between some states and foreign powers. It would take the Republican-Union victory in the Civil War to implement the Hamiltonian program, but when it took hold, the United States rapidly expanded to become the world’s leading industrial power.
Unfortunately, as the GOP loses ground outside the south, it risks losing its heritage as the party of national union. There are only three Republican Senators left in the Midwest battleground states. So-called “Toyota Republicans” from the old Confederacy, where foreign auto companies have set up assembly plants, have opposed government support for the American auto industry whose factories are mainly in the Midwest. “You look at the South,” Richard Shelby (R-AL) told CNBC. “You take — not just Mercedes in my hometown — but BMW, Honda and all of them. These companies are flourishing.” Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) even complained that foreign companies would not share “in the benefits of that automobile bailout program.” But Mississippi did give Nissan and Toyota more than $650 million in benefits to entice them to locate in Cochran’s state—not to mention all the subsidies and trade protection these foreign firms receive from their home governments in pursuit of their economic nationalism. These are the kind of foreign entanglements that Hamilton worried about in the antebellum era.
Under the restructuring plans being drawn up under pressure from the Barack Obama administration, Chrysler will be handed over to Fiat and General Motors will build a larger share of its cars in low-age foreign lands like Mexico and China. Republicans could attack such an outcome if they could think again as economic nationalists and champion American job creation against the Democratic White House. But don’t hold your breath.
Phillips has continued to argue that Republican economic policy was going in the wrong direction, in ever more strident tones as the trade deficit grew larger, and millions of American jobs were lost in industry and its supporting sectors. In his 2002 book, Wealth and Democracy: Decline and Fall of the American Empire he warned of ''financialization,'' a preoccupation with success in ''finance, technology and services'' and the neglect of ''basic manufacturing.'' The result would be speculation and “bubbles”, the bursting of which have plunged the country into its present recession with the loss of trillions in assets held by the middle class in retirement accounts and family homes. An economy built on rising debt rather than rising income, and focused on consumption rather than production, is the measure of decadence and decline.
In 2003, Phillips wrote a biography of William McKinley, hailing him as a campaigner whose understanding of the Midwest heartland (he was from Ohio) was used to put together a business-labor coalition that defeated the radical Democrat William Jennings Bryan in the critical 1896 presidential election. Key to this coalition, which in many ways presaged that of Ronald Reagan, was a trade policy that protected American industry so it could grow to meet rising demands, and further those demands by paying workers wages high enough to support a broad increase in the nation’s living standards.
McKinley was the keynote speaker at its first convention of the National Association of Manufacturers. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, McKinley had pushed through the Republican Congress a new protective tariff in 1890. To McKinley, economic policies were “like the obligations of a family” to each other. He found no feeling of obligation to or from foreign businessmen. “He performs no civil duties....He contributes nothing to the support, the progress, and the glory of the nation. Free foreign trade...results in giving our money, our manufactures, and our markets to other nations, to the injury of our labor, our trades people and our farmers.” said McKinley. The promise of the “full dinner pail” was predicated on moving high-paying jobs to America from overseas. Investing in America would be the only way to reach the affluent U.S. market.
“By the election of 1880 protectionism virtually equaled Republicanism" states historian Tom E. Terrill in his book The Tariff, Politics and American Foreign Policy 1874-1901, “The GOP, which included champions of industrialization and the spiritual heirs of Hamilton and Clay among its factions, naturally took up protection....The Grand Old Party could respond more positively to the needs of industry”….national industry, that is, not transnational firms that have abandoned America as a production site.
Using the firm foundation of American economic strength, McKinley was able to lead the country on to the world stage. He won the Spanish-American War and established the U.S. as an Asian power by taking the Philippines. It was during the long era of Republican political dominance from the rise of Abraham Lincoln to the fall of Herbert Hoover that the United States laid the groundwork for what became known as the American Century. As the GOP flounders around trying to reinvent itself, its members might do well to look back at this period when the Grand Old Party truly lived up to its name.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor William Hawkins is a consultant specializing in international economic and national security issues.
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