Books and Ideas: The Identity Crisis of Kevin Phillips
By Walter Olson
America is headed for an all-out kicking match between its Gucci-clad haves and its shoeless have-nots. Or so we may be hearing in coming months, since class conflict is the theme of The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (Random House, $19.95), a new book by one of the nation's most unstoppable opinionizers.
Author Kevin Phillips is to quote dispensers what Pez is to candy dispensers. Asking Nexis for his recent clips triggers the equivalent of a pinball TILT, warning that more than 500 are forthcoming. Phillips is one of the political commentators who dominate the talk-show circuit and, significantly, one of the few routinely labeled as a conservative.
He came to note in 1969 when, as a Richard Nixon adviser, he wrote The Emerging Republican Majority, a clever analysis of voting patterns around the country. As prophecy the book was shaky -- the fabled Sunbelt lasted longer as a catch-phrase than as a cohesive voting bloc -- but the author marshaled his maps and statistics with insight and striking detail and won an all-purpose public role as campaign oddsmaker, national mood intuiter, and roving commentator on substantive policy.
Gradually Phillips grew more pessimistic about the prospects of conservative success. His view was that Nixon had ushered in a rightward political trend in 1968 that was due any day to peter out, allowing a cyclical return to liberal-left dominance. What happened instead was that Ronald Reagan got elected. In the years that followed, Phillips relentlessly forecast practical failure and public rejection of conservative leaders and their policies.
The more successes Reagan scored, the harsher grew his tone. "No serious observer ever thought that an actor from Hollywood would make it into the first tier along with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt," Phillips wrote in 1987. "What now seems far-fetched is earlier speculation that he might join the six or eight of the second tier. He won't." Nor had the Noted Conservative much use for such figures as Margaret Thatcher, Robert Bork, or George Bush.
It got hard to tell where the mood forecaster left off and the change-of-mood exhorter began. In his monthly column for the Los Angeles Times, Phillips began beating the drum for an industrial policy and big tax hikes for upper earners, and accused free-trade supporters of being unpatriotic. Recently he proposed that well over $100 billion a year be shunted from defense into new government domestic spending. The differences between his creed of "populism" and the views of some leftish Democrats are not always easy to discern.
His current book represents a sort of wet-winged emergence from the ideological chrysalis. He insists that the way for Democrats to beat Republicans is to get the public mad at big business and the wealthy, and he devotes most of his 221 pages to stoking that resentment with every rhetorical means at his disposal. He even flays Democrat Michael Dukakis for stressing problem solving and economic growth instead of that more divisive theme during the 1988 campaign.
