Kevin Phillips on Financialization and Decline

I suppose that few these days encounter theorizing the "rise and fall of great economic powers" outside a university program or contact with the associated scholarship but it was more common to do so once upon a time. Thus did Paul Kennedy become a bestseller with a book about that subject in the late '80s, while in the earlier part of the century Republican strategist Kevin Phillips brought such arguments to that part of the popular audience that reads really serious books on public affairs (rather than just elite gossip and the rants of their preferred flavor of Talking Head), arguing for a particular variation on the theory (tying the great power cycle to particular energy regimes that had seen the Netherlands and Britain rise and fall in the past, as an oil-addicted America was at risk of doing) in 2006's American Theocracy. Two years later he related what he had written to the then just emerging crisis spawned by the combination of deregulation, loose monetary policy and financial "innovation" within an increasingly internationalized financial system in an ever-more financialized economy in Bad Money.

In an interview promoting the book Phillips said that Bad Money was his last about the political and financial affairs of the present, and that in his revulsion at the present state of things he was relieved to turn back from that to (I quote from memory, but here it goes) "People who deserve to be in the history of books," in contrast with the present-day elite that "deserve to be nothing." Hearing that I thought Phillips was sincere but probably wrong--that he would go back to writing about the present again soon enough. However, it turned out that this was exactly what he did. If the gravity of the crisis proved such that Bad Money got an update his next book was 1775: A Good Year for Revolution, while so far as I can tell he did not produce another book directly addressing contemporary affairs in the decade between that book's release and his passing in 2023. Still, it is all too easy to imagine what Phillips would have had to say about the post-crisis, Great Recession-mired, America in which the development of everything he had denounced so forcefully for so long continued unabated.