Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 20, 1993 TAG: 9306230271
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by BOB WILLIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Feel as if the walls are closing in on you?
Chances are you're a member of America's shrinking middle class. For most\ of the past decade, your income has been almost stagnant, your taxes have been\ rising and your prospects have been dimming.
You've felt the pressures building and you let your discontents be known.\ The theme of the 1992 presidential campaign was your plight and what the\ candidates were going to do about it. Political analyst Kevin Phillips agrees\ that the focus was correct; he's hopeful, though not blindly so, that the\ ruinous policies of the past can be changed and that the middle class _ and\ the nation _ can regenerate itself and its hopes.
Phillips is a shrewd observer of the American scene. He was author in 1969\ of "The Emerging Republican Majority," which Newsweek called "the political\ Bible of the Nixon era." Subsequent books included, in 1984, "Staying on Top,"\ making a case for a national competitiveness agenda. With "The Politics of\ Rich and Poor" in 1990, he emerged as a critic of the excesses of the\ Reagan-Bush era.
These had their counterparts in other times, notably the 1890s and the\ 1920s. Then too, the Republican Party pushed through policies that protected\ the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class. Why do such actions\ always come as a surprise to the American public?
Of course, the doldrums of recent years owe to more than preferential\ treatment by Republicans of the rich. Phillips cites parallels in the\ experiences of 17th-century Spain, 18th-century Holland and 19th-century\ Britain: overstretched military commitments, rising debt, dwindling\ manufactures, and a disproportionately large rentier and financier class.\ All of that added up to national decline.
Other industrial countries are also feeling the pinch nowadays, but\ Phillips notes that the United States is "alone in the trauma of a great power\ sliding from its increasingly distant zenith." Ordinary Americans, he says,\ have made democracy work, have used watershed elections (such as 1992 seemed\ to be) as a means of renewal.
Making democracy work, however, does not stop with electing a president\ every four years. Enough of us have to stay in the trenches to make sure the\ next waves of change do not overwhelm us.
Bob Willis recently retired from the editorial page of this newspaper.
by CNB