Phillips was a senior strategist for
Richard Nixon's
1968 campaign, which was the basis for a book, The Emerging
Republican Majority, which predicted a
conservative
realignment in national politics, and is widely regarded as one of
the most influential recent works in
political science. His predictions regarding shifting voting
patterns in presidential elections proved accurate, though they did not
extend "down ballot" to Congress until the
Republican revolution of 1994. Phillips also was partly responsible
for the design of the Republican "Southern
strategy" of the 1970s and 1980s.
Phillips was educated at the
Bronx High School of Science,
Colgate University, the
University of Edinburgh and
Harvard Law School. After his stint as a senior strategist for the
Nixon campaign, he served a year, starting in 1969, as Special Assistant
to the
U.S. Attorney General, but left after a year to become a columnist.
In 1971, he became president of the American Political Research
Corporation and editor-publisher of the American Political Report
(through 1998).
In 1982, the
Wall Street Journal described him as “the leading conservative
electoral analyst -- the man who invented the
Sun
Belt, named the New Right, and prophesied ‘The Emerging Republican
Majority’ in 1969.”
Ironically for someone who in later life became a virulent critic of
Republicans from the south and west, Phillips in his 1969 book
identified the "Heartland" as the future core of Republican votes, and
the "Yankee Northeast" as the future Democratic stronghold,
foreshadowing the current split between
Red States and
Blue States. More than 30 years before the 2004 election, Phillips
foresaw such previously Democratic states as
Texas and
West Virginia swinging to the Republicans while
Vermont
and Maine
would become Democratic states.
In
American Theocracy Phillips has come full circle, becoming a
very harsh critic of the
Republican Party (GOP).
PBS
journalist Allen Dwight Callahan[1]
describes the GOP "Politics Of Radical
Religion,
Oil, And Borrowed Money In The 21st Century" the book's subtitle
and theme, as an "Unholy
Alliance."[2]
Phillips' last chapter, in a nod to his first major work, is called "The
Erring Republican Majority." In the book, he "presents a nightmarish
vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility,
rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness."
He identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new
to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this
administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the
United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and,
as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic
policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity
into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing
levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government
and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there
is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked
essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look
beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires
so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.[3]
Phillips uses the term “financialization”
to describe how the U.S. economy has been radically restructured from a
focus on production, manufacturing and wages, to a focus on speculation,
debt, and profits. Since the 1980s, Phillips argues in American
Theocracy,
the underlying Washington strategy… was less to give ordinary
Americans direct sums than to create a low-interest-rate boom in
real estate, thereby raising the percentage of American home
ownership, ballooning the prices of homes, and allowing householders
to take out some of that increase through low-cost refinancing. This
triple play created new wealth to take the place of that destroyed
in the 2000-2002 stock-market crash and simultaneously raised
consumer confidence.
Nothing similar had ever been engineered before. Instead of a
recovery orchestrated by Congress and the White House and aimed at
the middle- and bottom-income segments, this one was directed by an
appointed central banker, a man whose principal responsibility was
to the banking system. His relief, targeted on financial assets and
real estate, was principally achieved by monetary stimulus. This in
itself confirmed the massive realignment of preferences and
priorities within the American system….
Likewise huge and indisputable but almost never discussed were
the powerful political economics lurking behind the stimulus: the
massive rate-cut-driven post-2000 bailout of the FIRE (finance,
insurance, and real estate) sector, with
its ever-climbing share of GDP and proximity to power. No longer
would Washington concentrate stimulus on wages or public-works
employment. The Fed's policies, however shrewd, were not rooted in
an abstraction of the national interest but in pursuit of its
statutory mandate to protect the U.S. banking and payments system,
now inseparable from the broadly defined financial-services sector.
Bad Money (2008)
Kevin Phillips tackles the reality that America has substituted
finance for manufacturing as its main focus. He also addresses America’s
play in oil and its tying of the dollar to the price of oil. The tying
of oil to the dollar is something that has propped up our currency and
caused political dissent particularly in the middle east. The
Euro and
the Chinese
Yuan/Renminbi
are favorites to take the dollar's place in countries hostile towards
America, like Iran. He then tackles the lack of control employed in the
housing market and how it was allowed to get away under the tutelage of
Alan Greenspan. All of this culminates in the idea that America is
employing bad capitalism and extensions of
Gresham’s Law of currency to suggest that our good capitalism will
be driven out.
[4]
Critical reception
American Theocracy was reviewed widely. The
New York Times Book Review wrote "It is not without polemic, but
unlike many of the more glib and strident political commentaries of
recent years, it is extensively researched and frighteningly
persuasive..."[5]The
Chicago Sun-Times wrote "Overall, Phillips’ book is a thoughtful
and somber jeremiad, written throughout with a graceful wryness... a
capstone to his life’s work."[6]
However,
Joseph Loconte, of the conservative thinktank the
Heritage Foundation labeled it a work of "irrational, fantastical,
near-nativist charges."[7]
Bibliography
Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global
Crisis of American Capitalism (2007)
ISBN 0-670-01907-0
"Now what I get a sense of from all of this — and then topped
obviously by spending all the money in 2000 to basically buy the
election — is that this is not a family that has a particularly
strong commitment to American democracy. Its sense of how to win
elections comes out of a
CIA manual, not out of the
Declaration of Independence or the
Constitution." — Kevin Phillips writing about the
Bush family in American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the
Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
Office Hours:
Office hours: Monday, 3:30-5:00 P.M. On leave fall term 2008.
Staff Support:
Helen Gavel
Littauer Center 127 E-Mail: hgavel@fas.harvard.edu Tel: 617-496-5464
January 2007
Benjamin M. Friedman is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political
Economy,
and formerly Chairman of the Department of Economics, at Harvard University.
His latest book
is The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, published in 2005 by Alfred A.
Knopf. Mr.
Friedman's best known previous book is Day of Reckoning: The Consequences of
American
Economic Policy Under Reagan and After, which received the George S. Eccles
Prize, awarded
annually by Columbia University for excellence in writing about economics.
In addition to Day of Reckoning and The Moral Consequences of Economic
Growth, Mr.
Friedman has written extensively on economic policy, and in particular on
the role of the
financial markets in shaping how monetary and fiscal policies affect overall
economic activity.
Specific subjects of his work include the effects of government deficits and
surpluses on interest
rates, exchange rates, and business investment; appropriate guidelines for
the conduct of U.S.
monetary policy; and appropriate policy actions in response to crises in a
country's banking or
financial system. He is the author and/or editor of eleven books aimed
primarily at economists
and economic policymakers, as well as the author of more than one hundred
articles on monetary
economics, macroeconomics, and monetary and fiscal policy, published in
numerous journals.
He is also a frequent contributor to publications reaching a broader
audience, including especially
The New York Review of Books.
Mr. Friedman's current professional activities include serving as a director
and member of
the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a director of the
Private Export Funding
Corporation, a trustee of the Standish Mellon Investment Trust, a director
of the National
Council on Economic Education, and an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York. In
addition, he has served as director of financial markets and monetary
economics research at the
National Bureau of Economic Research, as a member of the National Science
Foundation
Subcommittee on Economics, as an adviser to the Congressional Budget Office,
as a trustee of
the College Retirement Equities Fund, and as a director of the American
Friends of Cambridge
University. He is a member of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity and
the Council on
Foreign Relations.
Mr. Friedman joined the Harvard faculty in 1972. Before then he worked with
Morgan
Stanley & Co., investment bankers in New York. He had also worked in
consulting or other
capacities with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the
Federal Reserve Bank
of New York, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Mr. Friedman received
the A.B., A.M.
and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Harvard University; during his graduate
study at Harvard
he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows. In addition, he received
the M.Sc. degree in
economics and politics from King's College, Cambridge (U.K.), where he
studied as a Marshall
Scholar.
Most recently, Mr. Friedman was the 2005-6 recipient of the John R. Commons
Award,
presented every two years in recognition of achievements in economics and
service to the
economics profession.
Address:
© 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
