Kevin Phillips: Left Out

Kevin Phillips seems to think himself a sort of iconoclast, a clear-headed analyst spreading the truth amid the fog of confusion put forth by political Left and Right. Certainly that has been the underlying theme of his work, from The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969 to this year’s The Politics of Rich and Poor.

The earlier book is an extremely well-researched analysis of voting blocs and trends nationwide, forecasting realignment, coining the term “Sun Belt,” and adapting Milovan Djilas’s “New Class” to the American context. The current book argues that the Reagan era was primarily a time of redistribution of wealth—upward redistribution—and suggests the Democratic Party could achieve political domination by pushing hard for downward redistribution.

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Mark Cunningham

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Kevin Phillips seems to think himself a sort of iconoclast, a clear-headed analyst spreading the truth amid the fog of confusion put forth by political Left and Right. Certainly that has been the underlying theme of his work, from The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969 to this year’s The Politics of Rich and Poor.

The earlier book is an extremely well-researched analysis of voting blocs and trends nationwide, forecasting realignment, coining the term “Sun Belt,” and adapting Milovan Djilas’s “New Class” to the American context. The current book argues that the Reagan era was primarily a time of redistribution of wealth—upward redistribution—and suggests the Democratic Party could achieve political domination by pushing hard for downward redistribution.