Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics [Paperback]

Kevin Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1995

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.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Phillips's first book, The Emerging Republican Majority (LJ 1015/69), was praised as the political bible of the Nixon era. He became a Republican pariah after The Politics of Rich and Poor (LJ 5/15/90) was hailed by the Democrats in the 1992 presidential campaign. That work was the first in a trilogy on the plight of modern America. The second work, Boiling Point (LJ 3/15/93), documented the frustration of the middle class. Arrogant Capital offers solutions to "the beltway mentality" in Washington, D.C., and the greed of Wall Street. Abandoning hope of political reform through our two-party system, Phillips now favors direct democracy to prevent America's decline. Though some of his populist proposals are extreme, they deserve debate. His historical grasp of patterns among former world powers (e.g., Spain, Holland, Britain) add substance to his fears. Our modern Thomas Paine has written another readable volume that deserves widespread attention.
--William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books (September 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316706027
• ISBN-13: 978-0316706025
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #446,526 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History is repeating itself, unfortunately !, April 11, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics (Hardcover)

This has to be one of the best books on contemporary politics. Kevin Phillips did extensive research into the historical pattern of rise and subsequent decline of great powers and found uncanny similarity to where America is today. However, he did suggest 10 solutions that hopefully would arrest the decline of this nation and hoped those would be carried out in the 90s (this book was written in 94). Guess what ? None of his 10 solutions was implemented even to the slightest degree. If anything the problems he mentioned in the book have become even more serious in the past decade.

The decline of this nation is now inevitable. There is no need to shed tears over it, though. It happened to Rome, Greece, Spain, and most recently Britain. To think we can somehow escape was probably wishful thinking to begin with but the failure to take positive action to even to try to slow the decline just makes the ultimate fate that much more certain !

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best political books on this topic I have read, January 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics (Paperback)

I am a political science major at Oregon State University. I had to read this book for a class and was pleasantly suprised at how well written and interesting this book is. The author gives a loud and clear call to arms for the American people to change our government. The comparisons to other world empires hit very close to the present day US. His proposals for change are interesting and well thought out. I reccomend this book to anyone who is fed up with Washington and the power of interest groups, financial groups, and lobbyists.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Angry Call For Radical Reforms To Shake Up Washington, May 28, 2007

By 

Mark B. Cohen "Improving government for the ... (Philadelphia,PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics (Paperback)

The author Kevin Phillips is an exemplary example of a frequent Washington type: the former insider turned angry, prophetic outsider. Trained as an attorney, experienced as a a Republican Congressional aide at the modern lowpoint of Republican strength in Washington, acclaimed as a key strategist in Richard Nixon's 1968 Presidential comeback, the author has long been given to gathering masses of data and reaching bold new conclusions with a stunning certainty that is only partially vindicated by subsequent events.

The author's top six suggested governmental reforms are "(1) dispersing the capital and having Congress meet in another city for part of the year; (2) allowing congressmen and senators to vote from their home states and districts; (3) establishing a mechanism for national referendums; (4)concentrating a major attack on the hired-gun culture in Washington; (5) reining in abusive finance and its political influence by regulating electronic speculation, curtailing the nonaccountability of the Federal Reserve Board and establishing a federal financial transactions tax; and (6) fudning deficit-reduction largely by taxing its obvious beneficiaries."

The author's top ten broad proposals are "(1) Decentralizing or dispersing power away from Washington; (2) Modifying the U.S. Constitution's excessive separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches; (3) Shifting U.S. representative government more toward direct democracy and opening up the outdated two-party system; (4) Curbing the Washington role of lobbies, interest groups, and interest peddlers; (5) Diminishing the excessive role of lawyers, legalism, and litigation; (6) Remobilizing national, state, and local governments through updated boundaries and a new federal fiscal framwork; (7) Regulating speculative finance and reducing the poltical influence of Wall Street;(8) Confronting the power of multinational corporations and minimizing the effects of globalization on the average American; (9) Reversing the trend toward greater concentration of wealth and making the tax system fairer and more productive; (10) Bringing national and international debt under control."

To get to these and numerous other reforms and secondary goals, the author gives us a sweeping tour of what ails America, full of a unique collection of facts ( for instance, the decade by decade growth of governmental employment and population in the Washington metropolitan area), world historical parallels (comparing the broad trends of American economic history with that of Holland, Great Britain, Spain, and other countries), and American historical parallels (declaring frustration that as our country ages there is not the sweeping change with new administrations that there was with the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.)

The author tends to see Washington interest groups as part of a kind of vast conspiracy, focusing on its own interests at the expense of the public interests. He gives short shrift to the reality that many of the interest groups are in constant competition with each other for scarce resources: governmental funds in an era of tax cuts, favorable regulations in an era suspicious of any regulations, and the time and favor of relevant governmental decision-makers.

The author focuses a disproportionate amount of attention of the U.S. House of Representatives, as the body most susceptible to governmental reform. Yet, in this, the author ignores the fact that the overwhelming majority of lawyers and lobbyists are focused on the executive branch, which his gneral collection of reforms tends to ignore or downplay.

The author believes that the U.S. is at a crisis point, and he advocates this with a mixture of public opinion poll data, quotes from angry, longshot Presidential candidates, Washington think tanks, and historical parallels with other countries, especially English-speaking countries. But this wide-ranging collection of information, impressions, and attitudes tends to dilute the case he is making as well as strengthen it. If hostility to government among the populace is, in fact, a worldwide democratic phenomenon, then it is somewhat contradictory to argue that the unique governmental system of the United States is responsible for it.

The author believes America is a country past its peak, a country entering a profound stage of economic decline. Internationalism is not a series of policies designed to benefit the average American, the author warns, but rather a series of policies aimed to benefit a small wealthy slice of the public at the expense of the rest of the public. Public policy's goal should not be to promote internationalism, but to curb its negative effects on the average American, the author says.

Reading the author is always an eye-opening, thought provoking experience. He does not generate his own research, but is a broad and creative user of an incredible array of secondary sources--from Karl Marx to Ross Perot to leaders of Washington think-tanks to newspapers to histories of the U.S. and other countries. He is a peerless summarizer and polemicist whose contstant search for broad themes gives life and purpose to what otherwise might be a quicksand of statistics and studies.