Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans, and the Decline of Middle-Class Prosperity.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

Letting his ego out for a trot, Kevin Phillips begins Boiling Point by observing that during last year's presidential campaign, Bill Clinton, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Tom Harkin, Mario Cuomo, Jerry Brown, Lloyd Bentsen, Douglas Wilder, and Dick Gephardt all demonstrated that they had either read his last book, The Politics of Rich and Poor, "or drawn on its theses." On the other hand, "George Bush and his political advisers chose to ignore the book." Is it any accident that they're unemployed today? But the further implication--woe betide the president who ignores Kevin Phillips--is superfluous, because we now have, for perhaps the first time in our history, a president who can absolutely be counted on to read and assimilate the message of any new book on public affairs that gets even a fraction of the attention that is sure to come to Boiling Point. It's inconceivable that President Clinton won't be influenced by this book--which may not be good news.

Nearly everybody in the politics business agrees with Phillips that he deserves to be treated as an oracle. His status is well-earned. As a statistics-wielding young staff member on the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign, and shortly thereafter as the author of The Emerging Republican Majority, Phillips identified the most powerful force in national politics during the past quarter-century: Middle-class populism. As opposed to the People's Party populism of the late 19th century, or Huey Longism during the Depression, middle-class populism is not headquartered among the poor and dispossessed, and therefore it can go either way politically. During times of economic prosperity, such as the late sixties, the middle class could be persuaded to direct its resentment toward a cultural elite made up of intellectuals and bureaucrats who sneered at patriotism and other mainstream values and had empathy only for themselves and the minority poor. During times of relative cultural stability and economic trouble, such as the late eighties and early nineties, the middle class would switch to resenting the rich. (That's why Dan Quayle's sallies against the cultural elite didn't work in 1992.)

Thus, depending on its mood, the middle class might vote either Democratic or Republican--the only constant being the enormous potency of the resentment-of-the-elite theme. It was an important bellwether when Phillips, who seems to have a mystical, instinctive oneness with the middle class, announced a switch in his own resentments from cultural to economic in 1990 with the publication of The Politics of Rich and Poor.

If you take what Phillips says as indicative of the political mood...