Reading the Portents--UPDATED

Kevin Phillips has a new book coming out. This is worth paying attention to because he's a long-time Republican strategist and fairly accurate prognosticator of political trends. His most significant calling card is probably his first book, nearly forty years old now, The Emerging Republican Majority. That's where he predicted that a shift in population from the industrial North and Midwest to the suburbs of the Sun Belt (his term) would result in a significant political realignment toward the Republican Party. Sure, you can argue that in taking jobs with the Nixon presidential campaign and subsequent administration that he put himself in a position to influence policy to make his predictions come true, but if his foresight wasn't pointed in the right direction, he couldn't have manufactured the realignment all by himself.

Phillips started to fall out of favor with Republicans when he wrote The Politics of Rich and Poor, and he seemed to completely drop off the radar with American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. He can't expect to rebuild any bridges with the new one, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. He's back to making predictions, and some of them are doozies, but he's looking back for context, as well. Let's just say some of that context involves the Roman Empire, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Great Britain at points when each is well past its prime. The book's not out yet, and God knows this blog doesn't have a high enough profile that I'd have anything approaching an early review copy, so I can't lie to you and claim to have read it (well, I could, but you'd likely never believe me anyway). But I did read thought-provoking reviews in Salon (you know the drill--if you're not a subscriber, click through an ad to read the whole thing) and The New York Times Book Review (for which I thank a friend who forwarded a preview to me--I'll post a link when it's online). Here are a couple of quotes from Alan Brinkley's Times Book Review to whet your appetite:

No longer does [Phillips] see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness. (His final chapter is entitled "The Erring Republican Majority.") In an era of best-selling jeremiads on both sides of the political divide, "American Theocracy" may be the most alarming analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have appeared in many years.

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By describing a series of major transformations, by demonstrating the relationships among them and by discussing them with passionate restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing picture of national danger that no American reader will welcome, but that none should ignore.

UPDATE: Here's the Times Book Review link.