Phillips mentions a recent television appearance with a panel of liberal historians, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. As Phillips recalls the moment, his fellow panelists spoke of Bush and the Republicans in terms, to Phillips's mind, that were far too mild and tempered. When Phillips's turn came, he said to Schlesinger: "Now you're about to hear the real Republican viewpoint."
And with that Phillips fired both rhetorical barrels at Bush.
"I've never understood why we take Bush and his family seriously," says Kevin Phillips, who quit the GOP to become an independent.
(Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)
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As you might expect, Phillips's salvos, and his essays for such liberal magazines as the Nation and the American Prospect, don't amuse conservative Republicans. They talk and write of this former Republican theorist -- now a registered independent -- as a nephew might of a favorite uncle grown dyspeptic and perhaps daft. They describe him as a relic of the Nixon era, which in the vernacular of modern conservatism connotes something akin to dangerous liberalism.
"Like many Nixon admirers, Kevin Phillips left the Republican Party when it shifted its attention away from the nanny state towards a resurgent conservatism," writes Meghan Keene in a review of "American Dynasty" for the American Enterprise Institute. "Phillips . . . has long since distanced himself from Republican principles."
Some go further still. Robert Locke, a columnist with arch-conservative Frontpage.com, lacerated another conservative magazine for daring to print an essay by Phillips. To do so, Locke argues, "is very disturbing, and indeed bordering on political treason." Phillips, he says, has "descended into the muck of crude economic populism."
It's a strange business, this notion that Phillips is beyond the conservative pale and that Richard Nixon was a closet liberal and lover of the welfare state. Except that perhaps there's some truth to this. Nixon endorsed a 50 percent tax rate on the wealthy, courted labor unions and had an instinctive feel for lower-middle-class economic resentments. And far from destroying the welfare state, he proposed a guaranteed minimum income.
Several prominent old Nixon hands, from Patrick Buchanan to former Treasury secretary Peter Peterson, have enunciated tough critiques of Bush's foreign policy and his tax cuts. (Asked recently by Bill Moyers if he needed the Bush tax cuts, Peterson replied: "I'm really almost embarrassed by the idea . . . that I'm going to be getting tax cuts so that my 6-year-old . . . grandchildren can pay bigger taxes in the future.")
None of this surprises Phillips.
"Every time I wrote an attack on Bush Sr., Nixon would send me a handwritten note of praise," Phillips says. "People ask why I won't register as a Democrat. I tell them that after Bush, the [Republican] party may come back. I'm historiographically a Republican."
Phillips has sailed far from the Republican ports of his youth, but he's not comfortable throwing down an anchor in a Democratic harbor. He congratulates Democrats on their journey away from their political and cultural irrelevancy of the 1980s. As he puts it, they learned "the art of shutting up." But he sees a party that, like the Republicans, has developed an umbilical taste for the campaign money flowing from the Wall Street and media elites.
"The Democrats understand that they killed themselves politically when they reached a point where they couldn't talk to the blue-collar worker in South Philadelphia or Queens," he says. "But now they just want to raise as much money as the Republicans, and so they're mute."
He's confounded, too, by the Democrats' inability to savage their opponents. He frowns -- it's as if someone took pliers and pulled out the party's canine teeth. "The Democrats accumulated all this dirt on Bush, but they wouldn't use it," he says. "These people have no taste for the jugular."
Phillips's critique meets with eager nods from the Democratic left. Richard Borosage, a longtime left thinker and activist, has urged Democrats, particularly those of patrician mien like John Kerry, to adopt a populist edge, the better to defuse the cultural attacks of the Republicans. "Phillips has always been scornful of Wall Street Republicans, and he understands that the Republicans are scared of a populist critique," Borosage says. "Phillips and Lee Atwater always warned that a populist Democratic candidate would cause the most problems for Republicans."
Phillips's populism was not bred in the bone. He grew up a bright lad in a middle-class neighborhood of the Bronx. His parents were active Republicans and he found in voting trends and political history the same fascination that his teenage friends discovered in batting averages. Even today, if you ask Phillips about a particular hill county in Tennessee, he will walk you back to the Scots-Irish and their antipathy toward the royalist Cavaliers, and then take you forward to last year's Senate race.
