The trend appears to be that those who helped build the conservative movement are suddenly realizing they created a hideous monster. The latest is Kevin Phillips, author of the seminal 1969 tome "The Emerging Republican Majority". His latest book, "American Theocracy", is apparently
devoid of his early optimism.
Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In writing "The Emerging Republican Majority" (published in 1969), he asked a very big question about American politics: How would the demographic and economic changes of postwar America shape the long-term future of the two major parties? His answer, startling at the time but now largely unquestioned, is that the movement of people and resources from the old Northern industrial states into the South and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the "Sun Belt") would produce a new and more conservative Republican majority that would dominate American politics for decades. Phillips viewed the changes he predicted with optimism. A stronger Republican Party, he believed, would restore stability and order to a society experiencing disorienting and at times violent change. Shortly before publishing his book, he joined the Nixon administration to help advance the changes he had foreseen.
Phillips has remained a prolific and important political commentator in the decades since, but he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th) looks broadly and historically at the political world the conservative coalition has painstakingly constructed over the last several decades. No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness. (His final chapter is entitled "The Erring Republican Majority.")
It can't be said enough. The modern Republican Party has abandoned all pretenses of conservatism in favor of cult of personality. But those movement conservatists are dinosaurs in an era of Bushbots. They're either old, obsolete, and dying off, or they've been corrupted beyond recognition and are being forced to lawyer up.