Against Jefferson's Airy Platitudes

KEVIN PHILLIPS, a keen analyst of American politics, is also a historical sociologist in the best sense of the term. The ways in which our society is both constituted and divided, not only in the present but as a consequence of history, have long been his concern. Early in his career, this steered him toward the changing composition of the electorate, and thus toward those elections that reveal significant shifts in the demographic alignments that drive American politics. His insightful debut, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), analyzed the conservative realignment that increasingly drove Republican politics from the Nixon era to Bush the Younger in just those terms. Whether that era is now ending has become the burning question of the past few weeks—and one might hope that Phillips will return to this subject in his next book.