About Our Founder - Steve Phillips
Steve Phillips is the author of the The New York Times and The Washington Post bestselling book, Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and the book, How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good published in October 2022. The second edition will be out in March, 2024 and is available for preorder here. He is a columnist for The Nation and The Guardian and a regular opinion contributor to The New York Times. A national political leader and civil rights lawyer, he is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Follow @StevePtweets on Twitter to keep up with his musings on race, politics, sports, and more.
Steve’s Latest Articles
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
Nikki Haley’s difficulty articulating the cause of the civil war – the war that began in her home state of South Carolina – has put that issue in the headlines just days before the first votes are cast in the Republican nomination contest. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
The New York Times released a poll on Monday showing Donald Trump beating Joe Biden in several key states, and progressives across the country started to panic. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Washington Post
Do California Democrats believe that representation matters, or do they just pretend to? We’re about to get our answer. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
The party needs a sober, empirically grounded analysis of what we really know—and don’t know—about how best to expand support among white voters. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
The mainstream media has been harping on the implications of Black Republican candidates, but their influence on voters is not as significant as The New York Times suggests. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
One wonders what the Biden administration is afraid of when it comes to calling the Republicans’s bluff on raising the federal debt ceiling. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
“It’s hard to tell time by revolutionary clocks.” That observation by historian Lerone Bennett Jr. in an essay about the turbulent times of the late 1960s is equally apt today when trying to properly understand the dynamics of important political contests such as the 2024 race to replace California’s senior US senator, Dianne Feinstein. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
Today should be a national holiday in the United States, but the wrong people are celebrating. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
Welcome to White History Month! While February – the shortest of months – is typically associated with a 28-day acknowledgement of the historical contributions of African Americans, the truth of the matter is that this month, and every month, is actually a celebration of white history. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
House Democrats have a new campaign chief. She needs to make a lot of changes. Here are some good places to start. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Gaurdian
Why do we have such low expectations for white voters? The midterm elections brought into stark relief just how many white voters are willing to make a mockery of showing any pretense of concern for democracy, good governance or even the barest qualifications for our country’s highest offices. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
Big Democratic wins in 2022 in Arizona represent a promising trend, and progressives need to learn its lessons. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
From the civil war to the January 2021 insurrection, the white nationalist response to democratic defeat has been to attempt to destroy US institutions and our national agreements. We shouldn’t tolerate this. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
Those in the media sounding the alarm about civil unrest are right to be worried, but popular explorations of the term “civil war” don’t go far enough. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
A growing chorus of voices is warning that our democracy is in grave danger, but there is much less discussion of the exact nature of the threat. Recently, President Biden emphasized the severity of the threat by going to the place where the constitution was signed to give what the White House described as “a speech on the continued battle for the soul of the nation”. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
California will determine whether Democrats retain their majority in the House of Representatives. Conventional wisdom holds that the outcome of the midterm elections is a fait accompli in which Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will surrender her gavel to fellow Californian Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, but the actual outcome is far less foreordained, and the Golden State will have a big say in which Californian presides over the chamber in January 2023. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
Conventional wisdom holds that Democrats are doomed to defeat in this year’s midterm elections. It is an article of faith that the party that controls the White House automatically loses seats in the next election, so much so that members of the Biden administration are already hiring lawyers in anticipation of needing to fend off investigations by a Republican-led Congress. But such an outcome is not a foreordained law of nature, and Democrats have previously defied the odds—most notably in 1998. The lessons from that contest offer valuable insight about how to maintain Democratic control of the House of Representatives this year. Read more.
The last time the United States failed to properly punish insurrectionists, they went on to form the Ku Klux Klan, unleash a reign of murderous domestic terrorism, and re-establish formal white supremacy in much of the country for more than 100 years. As the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack begins televised hearings this week, the lessons from the post-civil war period offer an ominous warning for this moment and where we go from here. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
The surest way to lose a battle is to not fight. Despite this fairly obvious logic, President Joe Biden and too many Democrats seem to have adopted a political strategy for the midterm elections of avoiding as many fights as possible. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
Democrats worried about President Biden’s plummeting polling numbers and the party’s prospects in the midterm elections have stumbled on the solution to their problems: nominating and defending Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. By unapologetically championing racial equality in the form of finally putting an African American woman on the Supreme Court, they have both energized their base and garnered the support of a meaningful majority of the American people. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
“Black Girl Magic” is on full display in the supreme court confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Republicans are apoplectic. The juxtaposition of Jackson’s calm, confident, professionalism with the hostile, cynical and contemptuous questioning by senators such as Texas senator Ted Cruz is an object lesson for the entire world on the ongoing dynamics of systemic racism in the United States.
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
Rightwing legislators across the country have seized on the bogeyman of so-called “critical race theory” as the latest weapon in their centuries-long practice of trying to scare white people that their hold on the country is slipping away. A total of 14 states have now passed legislation restricting how and what teachers can teach about race and racism in America. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
After Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives in the 2020 elections, many were quick to conclude that the party had moved too far to the left, driving away Latino voters in the process. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
At the conclusion of the 1984 Democratic national convention, Jesse Jackson gathered his supporters and offered important perspective to those of us who had labored long and hard on his presidential campaign, telling us, “We’ve never gotten freedom at a convention. The convention is a comma, where you pause and go on. We’re going to keep fighting for freedom – at the polls, in the courts, in the streets.” And then he concluded by invoking the phrase made famous by Malcolm X – “Freedom, by any means necessary.” Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
Just as Stacey Abrams’s 2018 Georgia gubernatorial campaign laid the foundation for the transformation of US politics in 2020 and 201, Beto O’Rourke’s 2022 Texas gubernatorial candidacy has the potential to bring about similar long-term revolutionary changes in American politics and public policy priorities for decades to come. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Guardian
A debate is raging about what type of policies Democrats should lead with. Simply following the polls is a flawed approach. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
Terry McAuliffe’s defeat in Virginia shows what happens when you are in a war, and only one side fights. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
In light of Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s actions repeatedly obstructing progress on policies that would foster greater economic, and racial justice, momentum is gathering for an effort to back a Democratic challenge to her in the 2024 primary when she comes up for reelection. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
Nina Turner has been criticized for a lot of things in the wake of her loss in the Cleveland, Ohio, special election last week. The conventional wisdom is that her politics were too leftist, and that she was too confrontational, to win in a time when Biden-like moderate politics are the order of the day. Those takes are nonsense; the race was eminently winnable. If there is a single critical mistake Turner made, it was placing her campaign in the hands of strategists who squandered her financial firepower on ineffective and ill-conceived expenditures. Read more.
Steve Phillips, The Nation
Alarm bells are ringing about the dangerous implications of the behavior of the Republican Party. By doubling down on defense of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, punishing any members who reject that lie, refusing to support an investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and unleashing a fusillade of voter suppression legislation across the country, many see these actions as an ominous new trend in American politics that threatens the foundations of our democracy itself. Read more.