Kevin Phillips

For most of the 20th century, America manufactured things. For the past 30 years, though, it has chiefly manufactured debt. Wall Street, with the aid of both political parties, gravely damaged the economy.

How to balance northern and southern strategies is as central a challenge for the national Democratic Party in the 2000s as it was for the Republicans in the 1960s and ’70s. The irony is that some of the same tactical considerations apply — at least if one reverses regionalisms. Three decades ago, the GOP’s obvious […]

Of all the great deceptions that come to surround a gathering stock-market boom — from blather about the obsolescence of the business cycle to editorial claptrap about the United States turning into a republic of shareholders — one of the most pernicious has been the failure to recognize the character of the money culture it […]

Market extremism doesn’t wear hoods, white sheets, or armbands. Skinheads in its ranks are few. Suicide bombers in its cause are even fewer. But the essence of extremism, as opposed to other specific “isms,” is to extend — harshly, rigidly, and dangerously — a commitment and ideology that in softer and milder forms can be […]

U ntil recently there was no particular contemporary relevance to the nicknames of some of our less-favored presidents. Rutherford B. Hayes, victor in the hijacked electoral vote of 1876, was known as “Old 8-7” or “His Fraudulency.” John Tyler, promoted from vice president when William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia after only one month in […]