Quote of the Day (Phillips, on Dubya)

“George W. Bush doesn’t do elaborate concepts.” – Kevin Phillips, political theorist and author, speaking at the Louisville Free Public Library, May 8, 2008, on the attention span of the Presidential incumbent

(Over the weekend, while channel-surfing on cable TV, I was astonished to catch Phillips on C-SPAN correctly describing five months ago the circumstances that could lead to a meltdown of the U.S. economy. In the course of it, he made the above remark, which provoked guffaws from the audience. Today, I suspect, the gales of laughter would sweep from one end of the room to the other.

I admired two of Phillips titles from the 1990s—The Politics of Rich and Poor and Arrogant Capital. More recently, though never having voted for any member of the Bush clan, I dismissed the thesis of his American Theocracy that Dubya was establishing religious-based political rule in the U.S.—Ross Douthat, it seems to me, had the definitive retort to that notion pedaled by Phillips and others of a more leftist political stripe. Moreover, I found it hard to credit how someone like Phillips—who, as a young man, had anticipated, in The Emerging Republican Majority, the 1972 crushing electoral victory of Richard Nixon by advocating the morally hideous "southern strategy"—could find somebody far more objectionable than “Tricky Dick” in the current incumbent and his father.

I still think that Phillips’ latter contentions are overstated. But the events of the last several weeks, along with his sobering projections of the looming calamity we face now, led me to look anew at the economic basis of his work. Over the weekend, I picked up a copy of his latest, Bad Money, and though his Preface disclaims any “forecast of mayhem,” that claim seems simply pro forma. What I have read so far in it makes for powerful if depressing reading, all the more so because Phillips takes a political plague-on-both-your-houses stance, as he observes that “links to the ascendant financial sector are bipartisan, and for the Democrats, increasingly tied to New York and the Clinton dynasty.”)