I never recovered from the shock of the last grim Phillips book I read (The Emerging Republican Majority, in 1969), so I think I'll give this a miss.
Besides I have enough grimness on my plate already, reading Jeff Faux's gripping new book The Global Class War, which is basically a chronicle of what the Fully Emerged Republican Majority led to. I'm only halfway through, but so far the term "war" seems a misnomer, since all the shooting is being done by one side (guess who). Suffice it to say, the last 30 years or so seem even grimmer in Faux's retrospective than they were to live through.
BTW, Faux is the second keen-eyed anatomist I've read (the first being Michael Perelman) to identify the opening salvo in the current US class war as being fired in a little-noted episode -- i.e., in 1971 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce galvanized American capitalists into concerted political action when it circulated a confidential strategic memo entitled "Attack on the Free Enterprise System" by corporate lawyer (later Supreme Court justice) Lewis Powell. The memo stated that the survival of the free-enterprise system depended on launching a a long-term well-financed political campaign to change the way American's thoughty about economics.
And waddaya know? It worked! Here we are 35 years later, with plutocracy triumphant, the masses stupified and the country as a whole staggering from industrial decay and global imperial overstretch.
It will be interesting to see if this ever turns into a *two*-sided class war.
Carl