Summarized from the bookflap of
The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (1990):
Phillips was chief political analyst for the 1968 Republican presidential campaign and later served as assistant to the attorney general. Editor-publisher of The American Political Report, since 1971. Phillips is, at this writing, one of the most respected political pundits, largely due to his track record in understanding the demographic shifts and political alliances that have driven American politics since at least the Nixon administration.
His first book, The Emerging Republican Majority was described as the "political bible of the Nixon era." Phillips has been considered, especially since the Reagan-Bush era as one of the leading political strategists in America. One might get the impression, reading his economic analysis, that he is a closet Marxist. But more likely, he would describe himself as a pragmatist, in the tradition of William James.
The scope of Phillips analysis is probably what sets him apart from many aspiring political analysts. A quote, chosen more or less at random from The Politics of Rich and Poor:
"Conservatives in 1981 could not have moved public policy so far merely with a Chamber of Commerce viewpoint. No mere accountant mentality could have popularized a program almost certain to help the rich at the expense of others and to stuff more money into already fat investment accounts. But the president's theoreticians developed a greater resonance, paralleling the larger-than-ledgerdom ideas and momentum also apparent in previous U.S. capitalist expansions."
"A century earlier, at the peak of the rip-roaring U.S. industrial expansion following the Civil War, the incumbent Republicans had their own persuasive economic and social philosophers. National growth justified concentrated wealth and public policies that resulted in inequality. What had been vices became virtues. Avarice became achievement—a display, almost, of social fitness. Preeminent were the Social Darwinists, the men who took Charles Darwin's 1859 biological theory of evolution and transformed it into a cultural and economic thesis of the survival of the fittest...."
(p. 59)
To be added:
Other books by Phillips, etc.