Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

Here we go again. 2024 is an election year, and the Iowa Caucus for Republicans will be held in less than a week. Soon, the yard signs will go up, the bumper stickers will be slapped on, and the commercials will go into heavy rotation. Yet, for the first time in many years, Kevin Phillips won’t be among us to witness it. The conservative political writer, thinker, and pundit died in October at age 82.

Few people today know who Kevin Phillips was. Were I not a writer who seeks out lesser-known stories from Southern history, I probably wouldn’t either. Phillips’ work was important but not exactly sexy. In the mid-1960s, he worked as a Republican election strategist and may have been the first to use demographic data to effectively determine likely outcomes. His 1968 book The Emerging Republican Majority was a controversial but influential work that foresaw a reactionary post-Civil Rights shift among Midwestern and Southern whites, which would lead those voters to the Republican Party as the Democrats embraced policy positions in favor of diversity.

I’ve been interested in Kevin Phillips’ work because so many people in the Deep South – ones I’m related to, ones I’ve known – have lived out what Phillips predicted so well. This has mattered to my life most significantly because, as a public school teacher in Alabama for nearly twenty years, our everyday work depended on tax revenue and public policy. Twelve of my years in the classroom came after a two-pronged coup de grace: George W. Bush’s Great Recession of 2009 followed by the “Republican Wave” of 2010. That socio-political one-two punch brought immense changes to my work. The new Republican leadership of our state government cut classroom funding, passed anti-union, ethics, and “accountability” legislation, and hiked benefits costs that reduced our take-home pay. I had not seen these these historical shifts coming, but Kevin Phillips did— more than fifty years ago.

It was May 1970 when The New York Times‘ James Boyd wrote about Kevin Phillips’ prediction of “an inevitable cycle of Republican dominance that would begin in the late nineteen-sixties and prosper until the advent of the 21st century.” A look at the piece more than fifty years later reveals a creepy degree of foresight, including some uncomfortable insights about an ongoing modern argument: whether bigotry causes many white voters to lean Republican. Phillips thought it did, especially in the South, a factor that Republicans didn’t like him to articulate so effectively. Boyd wrote, “Most voters, he had found, still voted on the basis of ethnic and cultural enmities that could be graphed, predicted and exploited.” Furthermore, Phillips was quoted as remarking that black people voting Democratic helped the Republicans:

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.

However, an election strategy that only focuses on attracting the most racists won’t go far, and Boyd’s explanation of Phillips’ predictions for an “emerging Republican majority” included more than just racism. Strategists did rely on working-class, nativist whites refusing to ally themselves politically with the party of “colored minorities,” but drawing mainstream conservative voters required coalition-building and messaging that took into account a complex mixture of population shifts, traditions, and values. Phillips was quoted in the Times piece as referencing the “millions of working-class people who are looking for a party that relates to their needs.” His predictions displayed an eerie and unseemly prescience:

In the future, the liberal-conservative division will come on social issues; Middle Americans and the working class are socially conservative.

What makes it unseemly is another of Phillips’ conclusions: American voters seek to have their needs met but lack the sophistication to make good choices. Boyd’s article referred to Phillips’ belief that most Americans “delude themselves” when they think that they make “a free, contemporary judgment on an issue, a man, a record, or a party philosophy.” No, it’s not like that: “the average voter steps into the booth [and] registers the prejudice or the allegiance bred by a mix of geography, history, and ethnic reaction which stems from a past he knows only murkily.” He further cited the idea that “liberalism has turned away from the common people and become institutionalized into an establishment.” This, too, sounds familiar, i.e. “Make America Great Again.”

While we’re mired today in post-Great Recession, Trump-era politics, taking the time to understand our history can hold keys to understanding the present quandaries we currently face (and wish to resolve). In 2016, many white working- and middle-class voters found one more reason to vilify the “liberal elite” when Hillary Clinton alluded to “the basket of deplorables” in their midst: “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.” Rather than looking inward to determine why she said that or to whom she was referring, one common reaction was to ramp up the bitterness against Clinton and, for some, to embrace the term “deplorable” as a badge of honor that separated Trump voters (in the best way) from an out-of-touch elite. Instead of being a call to introspection, Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment had a similar effect to “Let them eat cake.”

Yet, this tactic of portraying Democrats and “liberals” as anti-Working Man is not new and should seem familiar. In the mid-1990s, a now-well-known Georgia representative named Newt Gingrich was using the same strategies, a la Kevin Phillips, to say the same things to goad the same audience to get the same result. In her August 1995 dual book review “The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich” about his To Renew America and the co-authored 1945, essayist Joan Didion put it this way:

The real substance of Mr. Gingrich’s political presence derives from his skill at massaging exhaustively researched voter preferences and prejudices into matters of lonely principle. The positions he takes are acutely tuned to the unexamined fears and resentments of large numbers of Americans, yet he stands, in his rhetoric, alone, opposed by “the system,” by “Washington,” by “the liberal elite,” by “the East Coast elite” (not by accident does a mention of Harvard in 1945 provoke the sympathetic President’s antipathy to “East Coast snobbery and intellectual hauteur”), or simply by an unspecified “they.”

Twenty-one years later, in 2016, “the system” had been re-branded as “the swamp,” and “To Renew America” had become “Make America Great Again.”

This negative notion of a liberal intelligentsia seems to be just another incarnation of former Alabama governor George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals” from the 1960s, but it also seems to be the flip side of the coin to noblesse oblige, the old notion that well-to-do, well-educated elites had a paternalistic interest in the welfare of those who lacked wealth and knowledge. By contrast, the “liberal elite” or “liberal establishment” of today is assumed to despise and belittle working and poor people, instead preferring to create a “welfare state” that enriches a few team players and cripples everyone else with regulations that hamper basic rights and with taxes that become handouts to freeloaders. The effects of the “liberal agenda” are purported to be negative for everyone involved and are described as having no upside. This rhetoric gets pulled out of the bag of tricks over and over . . . because it works. (For a brief discussion of anti-intellectual remarks made over the last half-century by conservative thinkers, see this 2012 article from The Chronicle for Higher Education.)

By 2014, two decades after Gingrich’s rise to prominence, the party’s strategy had worked well, and there was confidence in this platform and its base. Support in the South and Midwest had become almost unflappable, just as Kevin Phillips had predicted. The party held both houses of Congress as well as many state legislatures. In “The Emerging Republican Supermajority,” John Hood of the conservative National Review wrote, “As it turned out, the Republicans and conservatives appear to have spent more wisely [than the Democrats] while benefiting from a favorable issue environment.” Of course, two years later, the 2016 election of Donald Trump confirmed that comfortable position, and Kevin Phillips’ all-important white working-class voters were a key element in putting a man in the White House who promised that he would “Make America Great Again.”

What is interesting to me about working-class support for Republicans is the party’s lack of enthusiasm for institutions and policies that can enable working-class and poor people to move up, or at least hold steady, in the world: public schools and public libraries. Strong public schools and public libraries have great potential benefits for Americans who lack resources but still want a good education and trustworthy information, which lead to better opportunities. Schools’ and libraries’ main function is to provide the mass of people with knowledge that can yield meaningful betterment, personally if not professionally. For example, a knowledge of history and civics can help people to recognize “fake news” and to comprehend the political system. The skills involved in critical reading can help a person to make good judgments based on factual information. Knowledge about science and mathematics can help a person avoid superstitions about causes and effects in nature.

Yet, the Republican approach to public education has occupied the unfortunate territory between ambivalent and ham-fisted. To lead America’s public schools, perhaps our greatest mechanism for socio-economic advancement, President Trump appointed a controversial, anti-public schools billionaire with no experience in an educational institution. For post-secondary, despite his campaign proposal to provide student-loan debt relief by capping repayment amounts, his boldest move was to revamp relief programs to the detriment of borrowers, most notably affecting some forgiveness programs for teachers. And on the state level, a handful of governors and state legislatures created policies that negatively affected teachers and public schools, some of which led to walkouts and protests.

I see these circumstances in light of the phenomenon that Kevin Phillips predicted. Many – but certainly not all – working-class and middle-class whites in the South regard the Democrats as the party of handouts, especially for “colored minorities.” Public education has become a Democratic Party issue, but the problem with that view is: it neglects the nuances of how public education fits into our society and our economy. The Republican Party’s appeal to working- and middle-class class white voters with promises of good jobs and renewed prosperity comes in a package deal with its ambivalence about public education, which could enable working people to access better opportunities. After all, a jobs-focused local or state government can only recruit new industries for their citizens if those citizens can actually do those jobs— and the best path to better jobs is increased skills and knowledge.

However, the raison d’etre of this anti-public education plank in Republican politics may not be about all that, as revealed in this NBC Left Field video segment featuring former Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd.

As the Republican majority has enjoyed its heyday, another re-alignment of voters has occurred: college-educated, suburban voters have been skewing hard toward the Democrats, while non-college-educated white voters, especially in rural areas, have been skewing hard toward Republicans.

For some years now, the most recent incarnation of conservative anti-intellectualism has claimed that colleges are making their students more “liberal.” We’ve also heard that liberal arts degrees are “useless” and that no one can get a job with a degree in English, history, or philosophy. (Both assertions are false.) However, what may be more consequential is: people who undertake these courses of study emerge with strong critical-thinking skills that can dissect political rhetoric and assess it in complex terms. In short, college graduates are more likely to recognize flawed rhetoric when we hear it.

Though my ideas about society and politics are left-leaning, I’m one of those darn independents who makes up his mind each election cycle about who to vote for, the ones that political operatives like Kevin Phillips can’t predict. To do that, I use the skills from my liberal arts education to make good decisions. Instead of party labels and straight-ticket voting, I pay attention to campaign messages and read diligently, both from news sources and in documents like reports and studies. And every election cycle, without fail, I have to wade through the hackneyed claims of the self-proclaimed Lone Rangers who promise to stand up to the mythological host of boogeymen— the ones who want to destroy America, the ones whose mission in life is to take everything from hard-working people!

Kevin Phillips’ New York Times obituary led off by calling him a “conservative mastermind,” but also noted that he “had second thoughts after assessing income inequality under three Republican presidents.” He wrote two books, both published in the 2000s, that criticized presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. He had seen the reality of his early vision. In the late 1960s, Phillips declared that liberal politicians had turned away from ordinary working people, but thirty to forty years later, he had seen what his own people would do with political power. It seems odd than a man could be both right about the path and wrong about the destination, but I guess Kevin Phillips managed it.