>>Is anyone familiar with Phillips?
>
>He wrote "The Emerging Republican Majority" back in the '60s,
>setting the basic Sun Belt strategy that has proved such a winner
>for the GOP ever since. In recent years he seems to have been
>heading leftward, decrying the growing gap between rich and poor and
>now -- obviously -- lambasting the WTO.
I think his first appearance in public life was in Garry Wills's Nixon Agonistes, where explained his theoretical key to politics as knowing who hates whom. Phillips' Southern Strategy used white fear/hatred of blacks to get poor and working class whites to vote for plutophiles who would work against the material interests of their mass base. Obviously, the strategy worked well. Phillips turned on the Republicans he used to advise in the 1980s, denouncing the polarization of wealth and income that were the inevitable result of the policies he helped promote. Reviewing his late-1980s book, The Politics of Rich and Poor, Thomas Byrne Edsall said that Phillips was like an architect who, on seeing the house s/he designed actually built, decided s/he didn't like the plan after all.
Doug