The Phillips curve; is there an emerging populist majority?

• Author: Glastris, Paul

by Paul Glastris

Kevin Phillips earned his reputation as an acute Political prognosticator for his 1968 book The Emerging Republican Majority, in which he coined the term "the Sun Be t." Hindsight has not been as kind to some of his later predictions. In Post-Conser-- vative America, published in 1982, he argued, among other things, that the third-party candidacy of John Anderson was a momentous event that could redefine American politics. Phillips's latest book* is intriguing, well researched and forcefully argued. But his fallibility is something to keep in mind, especially if you are a liberal, because his thesis is precisely what liberals want to hear: that the Democrats will profit from a rising populist backlash against the rich-get-richer policies of the Reagan-Bush administrations. The liberal left has, of course, been making this case for years. But Phillips's conservative credentials add a kind of reverse neocon respectability.

The first half of his thesis-that the rich made out fabulously in the 1980s while the bottom half of America got a smaller piece of the pie-is familiar and indisputably true. Phillips pokes fun at media commentators who describe as "rich" those with $50,000 or $100,000 annual incomes. Such people are mere foot soldiers in a march directed by awesomely rich generals in the upper half of the I percent bracket, who measure their extraordinary gains not in income but in assets and net worth. The number of decamillionaires, centimillionaires, and billionaires in the U.S. nearly tripled from 1980 to 1988. Only rarely in American history-the Gilded Age of the 1880s and the Roaring 1920s-have the rich gained like this. Such eras, argues Phillips, inevitably spark political counter movements: William Jennings Bryan's Prairie Populism and FDR's New Deal.

Phillips doesn't believe that the growing chasm between the super-haves and nearly everyone else can be fully explained by market forces. Too much evidence points to self-interested manipulation of the rules of the game by those at the top. A Business Week survey found that in 1979, the average CEO made 29 times as much as the average manufacturing worker. By 1988, the average CEO was making 93 times as much.

Washington was the biggest manipulator. It's not exactly news that Reagan's tax policy favored the well-to-do. But Phillips relentlessly argues that nearly every Republican creation of the past decade did the same. The deficits kept real interest rates high, a...