The Baffler #75 Sept. 2024

“In the United States, political change is evolutionary rather than revolutionary,” the Republican political analyst who helped devise the racial grievance-driven Southern Strategy, in 1969’s The Emerging Republican Majority. That book’s intensive taxonomy of which whites broke for Nixon and why—Phillips referred to his research as an outgrowth of “taking zoology in the classroom”—inaugurated a pop-Darwinist tendency among commentators: extrapolating prophecies of America’s political future from some supposedly imminent preponderance in the changing population. Accordingly, Democratic partisans have made Phillips’s titular locution their own, taking the country’s looming majority-minority status to mean a likely voting bloc perpetually blue.