Is A Populist Revolt at Hand?

THE POLITICS OF RICH AND POOR by Kevin Phillips

Random House; 262 pages; $19.95

In the shoot-from-the-hip world of Washington prognostication, Kevin Phillips stands out like a Nostradamus. As early as 1969, he foresaw the revolt against permissiveness and the disaffection of white Southerners with the Democratic Party, which helped create "the emerging Republican majority" that has dominated American politics for the past 20 years. Now he has a major new book that could portend good news for the ailing Democrats: the 1990s, he argues, will bring a populist backlash against the greedfest of the 1980s.

Phillips brings the authority of statistics and history to his argument: with an elegant weaving of charts and cultural observations, he paints a picture of the Reagan decade as America's third period of "heyday capitalism," when the poor got poorer, the middle class had to get rich in order to retain a middle-class life-style, and being rich had to be redefined to account for the tripling in the number of multimillionaires.

Only twice in American history, he contends, did the rich gain so much: during the Gilded Age of the 1880s and the Roaring Twenties. Both periods were followed by countermovements: William Jennings Bryan's populism and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. "Only for so long will strung-out $35,000-a-year families enjoy magazine articles about the hundred most successful businessmen in Dallas or television programs about the life-styles of the rich and famous," he writes ominously. "And the discontents that arise go well beyond lower-class envy or the anticommercial bias of academe."

The analysis follows in the tradition of cyclical historians, such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who see alternating periods of civic action and reaction. But Phillips is not a hand-wringing liberal pining for a return to power; he is a conservative political scientist who once worked for Richard Nixon. For all the rigor of his economic dissection, however, Phillips offers few clues about the form this populist upheaval is likely to take -- a disappointing weakness given that politicians as varied as George Wallace and Jesse Jackson inspired followings that were described as populist.

Phillips sees signs in a few polls that middle-class Americans are ready to ! reject Reagan's era of neglect toward the poor. But, so far, signs of any sort of populism are scant, even among Democrats who presumably would harness it. The U.S., still largely dominated by self-reliant escapees of a stratified Europe, has been disinclined to believe that Government should help narrow the gap between rich and poor. Only 29% favor the idea, according to a recent poll. The concept became particularly distasteful in the 1960s, when the push for civil rights redefined equality largely in racial terms. Over time, whites have come to see Government's economic engineering as a threat to their own opportunities.

This may explain why the resentments the poor and middle class harbor at the end of the Reagan decade seem to have aggravated racial tensions rather than creating, as Jesse Jackson hoped, a "rainbow coalition" of poor and disaffected citizens of all colors. New York City has recently lurched from scholarly disputes about race to racial showdowns, a Milwaukee alderman has threatened to form a Black Panther militia if the city does not improve the conditions of blacks, and campuses across the country are so infected with intolerance that educators have organized mandatory "sensitivity training" sessions. In this climate it is hard to imagine that a sense of class solidarity would emerge for the insurgency that Phillips envisions.

Instead of a populist revolt, the legacy of the 1980s appears to be a widespread sense of civic alienation. This fall an estimated two-thirds of the electorate will not go to the polls. Large numbers of American households resisted sending back their census forms, and this year's tax-evasion gap is expected to exceed $100 billion for the first time ever. Faced with the largest financial fiasco in U.S. history -- a savings and loan bailout that could cost up to half a trillion dollars -- American taxpayers have barely uttered a peep. "People don't feel any sense of ownership over the Federal Government," says Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin. "It isn't them, and it isn't theirs."

For Americans to run to the barricades, they have to care enough to erect them. So far, for their dose of populism, Americans are content to let their patrician President eat pork rinds, lay out a horseshoe pitch at the White House and evoke a "kinder, gentler" nation like a smug, self-fulfilling national mantra.