In this he speaks, not to progressives, but to conservatives. He looks at conservatism of things, such as the capital of petroleum, and the conservatism of totems, which is religious zealotry, and rejects them. Kevin Phillips is still a conservative in his heart, but what he is attached to, what is worth conserving to him, is something quite different, namely, a kind of moral rectitude and self-sufficiency. Thus, late in his books, his chapters on debt and the financialization of America - where America ceases to lend, and instead borrows, and ceases to make, and instead consumes - read with the same moral indignation that any sermon might have. He looks upon the "rentier class" with the same kind of disdain that others might reserve for drunkards. In his hands, the phrase "post-industrialism" takes on the same kind of epithet-like quality that the word "post-modern" might in another context. It is this moral outrage, this basic return to a Puritan ethic of making and selling, and not some conversion to liberalism, that guides Phillips. It is why he longs for a revived Republican Party, rather than throwing his lot in with the Democrats directly. ...
This book then represents not a volume that progressives need to read, but one that they need to give. Because Phillips does this without reference to the liberal or progressive totems in society; he disdains Lyndon Baines Johnson as much as he ever did; he has not accepted the "liberal-left" ideology. Instead he longs for the days when we were guided by an "invsible hand," rather than kicked by the "invisible foot" of debt. For the days when sensible men of commerce made decisions based on data.
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