A True Neo-Conservative??????

When I was a political science student at the University of Florida close to fifteen years ago, my favorite professor, Dr. Richard Scher always referred to commentator Kevin Phillips as the "smartest Republican in America." From that point forward I took particlar interest in Phillips writings as well as his televsion appearences on CBS News and C-SPAN. I was shocked to see such a prominent Republican making so much sense on every major issue of the day. As it turns out Phillips, the architect of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy went from the brightest Republican operative in late 1960s to partisan outcast in the mid 1990s and finally left the GOP and Washington for good in the late 1990s.

Kevin Phillips who wrote the seminal political work of a generation, "The Emerging Republican Majority," in 1969 while working as a political advisor to President Nixon, has now written two important books in the past five years: Wealth and Democracy, a History of the American Rich and most recently, American Theocracy.

Phillips' work with Nixon, led the President to adopt the "Southern Strategy" which has helped the Republicans hold the White House for 7 of the past 10 national elections. But these days Phillips seems contemptuous of the GOP coalition, and especially of the Bush Family whom he has labeled an "American Dynasty." As traditional conservative, Phillips expresses disappointment with the GOP's current alliance with the oil industry, big business and fundamentalist religious forces from non-traditional churches. (Such as the Penacostals, and the Southern Baptist Convention)

Beginning in the late 1980s when he expressed disdain with the Reagan legacy, Phillips has laid out in several books, public appearances and essays the historical background for the current GOP governing coalition, and its dangerous excesses which could create a collapse of both American hegemony economic and political as well as the groups that make up the coalition. Phillips is not only a brilliant contemporary political analyst, but he's about as good as anybody in understanding historical precedence and its significance in current times. The underlying point of his works is that the Republican coalition he helped assemble in the 1960s has run amok and has skewed its priorities and to where not only the coalition is endangered but so to is the American nation.