Kevin Phillips
Kevin Phillips died last week. Phillips gained fame or infamy depending on one's perspective for his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. In the years following, Phillips was blamed for the Republicans' strategy of playing on White fear and ignorance over the enfranchisement of Black America. However, as Phillips always claimed, his book was not a “how to” but an astutely accurate assessment of “what” was happening as Republicans adopted what had previously long been the racist politics of the Democratic party for political advantage in the South and many northern big city, white flight suburbs.
By 1969, the trend had already been established, first understood by Lyndon Johnson when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 telling an aide he just signed away the South for generations. While maybe apocryphal, Johnson certainly had the political chops to completely understand what was coming. In 1966, Ronald Reagan first helped form the politics of the emerging Republican majority to be elected Governor of California. Then in 1968, George Wallace, Democratic segregationist and former Governor of Alabama ran a third party candidacy for president, winning five deep south states and taking away enough votes across the rest of the country to elect Richard Nixon. Phillips, an astute observer and analyst of American politics, realized the by the now established trend would only grow.
Phillip's next book in 1975, Mediacracy: American Parties and Politics in the Communications Age, was an excellent look at the developing new technological elite that was beginning to greatly impact the republic's politics. The mediacracy was comprised of the broadcast media, Hollywood, think tanks and analysis firms, weapons firms, and of course the developing computer sector, all helping overturn the established industrial political order. Phillips astutely wrote,
“Instead of having a vested interest in stability, as did previous conservative business establishments, the knowledge sector has a vested interest in change – in the unmooring of convention, in socioeconomic experiments, in the ongoing consumption of new ideas. .…change is as essential to the knowledge sector as inventory turnover is to a merchant or manufacturer. Change keeps up demand for the product (research, news, theory, and technology).”
That's a spot-on analysis, however it also revealed Phillips suffered from a lack of understanding inflicting most industrial conservatives. Industrialism was as radical as the new tech and just as “unmooring of convention.” Yet, conservatives born into industrialism accepted it as the established order. I always found it amusing to hear many a conservative defending practices decades or at most a century old, but Phillips was much more than this.
I knew of Phillips, mostly in reference to his first book, when in 1990 I read his excellent new book, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath. I heard about it watching Phillips’ great interview on CSPAN. Here was a Republican with a much better critique than most Democrats of the era about what happened with the American economy over the previous ten years. The financializaton, de-industrialization, and concentration of wealth initiated by the no means conservative, but quite radical Reagan Revolution.
For amusement, yesterday I looked up the NYT's review of the book. I wasn't disappointed. Written by a Yale School of Drama MFA, the review concludes, “Perhaps the increasing foreign ownership of America's property and resources will help to soften the impact of what Mr. Phillips refers to so chillingly as the 'relevant events of the 1990's?'” Lord, you couldn’t make that up.
Phillips was one of those Republicans, and there were many, who immensely disliked the “tennis and trust fund” Bushes. Today, I’d wager most tennis and trust funders are Democrats. Phillips gets to the nut, “American politics doesn't work well when either party doesn't represent the average American.” He thought a response would develop similar to the Populists and Progressive Eras, but “something more superficial and less fully rooted.” He had a wrongheaded, but by no means unique, cyclical view of history. However, “superficial,” what better description of Mr. and Mrs. Bill, two years before their ascension to the White House.
It would take another quarter century for American politics to produce a reaction to the politics of rich and poor that began in the 80s and was continued by both Republicans and Democrats. That reaction was Trump. This was no cycle in history, but a completely new reactionary American politics. For all his insight, Phillips missed the breakdown of the American system, the decline of the republic, its institutions, and the democratic values of the citizenry.
Over the next two decades, Phillips would write a number of other excellent books documenting the nation's fate. The titles alone telling the story leading to 2016; Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans, and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity (1993), Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street and the Frustration of American Politics (1994), Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (2002), American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush,(2004), and in 2008, right before the financial system collapsed, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.
In the end, what Phillips best represented is the sad fact American politics is now impervious to the influence of books, maybe even the written word. Contemplate that and what it means for our two and half thousand year old Western Civilization. Mr. Trump doesn't read, he’s a pure product of television and bad money. Old Joe, Lord knows whatever it is that labels itself Democratic at this point. This folks is why “Life in the 21st Century” is no political effort, but simply educational entertainment or entertaining education, whichever pays more, and what value gotten for your entertainment dollar — sha la la la