Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics - Softcover

Phillips, Kevin P

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316706027 ISBN 13: 9780316706025

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 1995

Synopsis

Everyone knows that Washington is completely out of touch with the rest of the country. Now Kevin Phillips, whose bestselling books have prophesied the major watersheds of American party politics, tells us why. Washington - mired in bureaucracy, captured by the money power of Wall Street, and dominated by 90,000 lobbyists, 60,000 lawyers, and the largest concentration of special interests the world has ever seen - has become the albatross that Thomas Jefferson and our other Founding Fathers feared: a swollen capital city feeding off the country it should be governing. Throughout most of our history, the genius of American politics was that ballot revolutions every generation swept out failed establishments and created new ones. Now that can no longer happen. Feared and even hated by a majority of the citizenry, "Permanent Washington" has dug in. Using history as a chilling warning, Kevin Phillips parallels the present atrophy to that of formerly mighty and arrogant capitals like Rome, Madrid, andAmsterdam.,Unchecked, Washington will - like other great powers before it - lead the country to its inevitable decline and fall. To work again, Washington must be purged and revitalized. In his unique blueprint for a political upheaval, Kevin Phillips puts Washington on notice by sounding a cry for immediate action, offering us a wide variety of remedies - some quasi-revolutionary, others more moderate, but all sure to be controversial.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

A blistering jeremiad that gives new vibrancy to the political clich‚ that Washington is out of touch with the average American. At first glance, it would seem that any book rehashing this idea, even calling for a Jeffersonian-style electoral revolution, is hardly onto anything new. But Phillips (The Politics of Rich and Poor, 1990) is a brilliant reader of the political tea leaves; this seasoned Washington observer more than compensates for boiler-plate populism with a steady accretion of detail and provocative historical comparisons. For instance, he not only notes how parasitic the Beltway has become, but catalogues it with alarming data: the capital is overrun, he states, by 40,00050,000 lawyers, 90,000 lobbyists, a Congressional staff of 20,000, and 12,000 journalists. Phillips also finds novel examples of ``the capital's intermingling of public service, loose money, vocational incest, overinflated salaries, and ethical flexibility.'' One instance is what he calls ``loophole nepotism,'' the congressional practice of putting relatives on a colleague's payroll. Former assets of the American tradition have become liabilities, he thinks, including a separation of powers that discourages cooperation and responsibility, and a labyrinthine framework with 83,000 state, county, and city government subdivisions. Moreover, the government's inability to regulate electronic financial speculation has exposed the middle class to the decline of the manufacturing sector and even white-collar downsizing. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are willing to reform the mess since they feed at the special-interest trough. Phillips draws useful parallels with three capitals once afflicted with unproductive hangers-on: Madrid in the 1590s, the Hague in the 1690s, and London in the 1890s. He calls for reform measures ranging from the quixotic (periodically moving Congress out of the capital) to the sensible (the elimination of incentives for lawyers and lobbyists). Unusually wise to the dodges of Washington's rich and powerful. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Decrying the influence of political and financial elites, veteran pundit Phillips ( The Emerging Republican Majority ) here attempts to channel the dissatisfactions of the general populace, as evinced on radio talk shows, into national reform. "Capitals rot first," he declares, drawing briefly on such historical analogues as Hapsburg Spain and 18th-century Holland to buttress his argument that the current centers of American power, Washington and Wall Street, have sunk into decadence. Echoing recent critiques like Jonathan Rauch's Demo sclerosis , he highlights a bipartisan support for the government status quo. While Phillips wisely focuses on governmental, not social reform, his generalization that conservatives blame cultural weakness while liberals underscore economic decline ignores the influence of more nuanced thinkers like Cornel West. Among Phillips's better suggestions: move away from the two-party system by allowing referenda and considering proportional representation; raise taxes on the "really rich." Some problems, like the mercenary culture of lobbyists, may be less amenable to remedy by policy than by moral suasion, but Phillips sets an agenda for debate. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0316706027
• ISBN 13: 9780316706025
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320