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The Populist Establishmentarian: A Review of Kevin Phillips's Arrogant Capital
Kevin Phillips's Arrogant Capital doesn't quite hold together. The book rests on a questionable analysis of the socioeconomic state of affairs in late twentieth century America. But what is more confusing is that Phillips starts out sounding like a populist in the great American tradition of social criticism and ends up sounding like a proponent of the elite political establishment.
Phillips offers a series of proposals for restructuring American politics in response to what he argues is the imminent decline of America as a great power. The proposals range from breaking down the separation of powers between Congress and the presidency to increasing direct democracy. He proposes weakening the power of lobbyists, multinational corporations, and Wall Street. He wants to change state and municipal boundaries, make taxes more progressive, reduce the inequality of wealth, reduce national debt, and curb the role of lobbying and litigation in government. The proposals are, one by one, interesting, but Phillips doesn't link them together in a coherent program in which proposals are connected systematically to the problems that lead him to conclude that America is on the verge of a social and economic breakdown.
Phillips is critical of how American government works to protect entrenched economic interests, but suggests political changes that would expand the power of government and weaken the countervailing powers that offset the ability of government to protect narrow interests. He is critical of centralized power, but suggests that government needs to be more effective in solving the problems besetting the country. He sounds like a populist when he calls for more direct participation and local control, but the solutions he proposes would leave the government as the central institution in responding to social and economic problems and would leave the current political establishment largely in place.
Phillips's central argument that America is on the verge of decline as a great power is problematic. The argument is based on questionable assertions about the economic and cultural state of the nation that reflect many of the popular political anxieties of the past 10 years: the growing gap between rich and poor, increasing crime rates, decline in domestic manufacturing, moral decay, national debt. Phillips weaves these anxieties together...