American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush

By Kevin Phillips. Viking, 397 pages, $25.95.

Although it is part of the American temper to believe that issues present themselves, are resolved (often by force), and cause no further trouble forevermore, Kevin Phillips's new book, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, leaves one with the distinct impression that the truth is quite alarmingly otherwise. Phillips today is, perhaps, the Republican Party's most prominent apostate; he rose to fame in 1969, when his book The Emerging Republican Majority more or less correctly predicted the end of the New Deal, but in the last decade his name has most frequently been associated with bitter criticisms of the emerging Republican plutocracy and of a new gilded age in which wealth has been massively redistributed upward.

Members of the Bush family are plutocrats, of course – financial buccaneers disdainful of any real intellectual or cultural achievement. (As Phillips notes, the family has never produced a doctor, a lawyer, or a professor.) But – much, much worse – they are also crypto-monarchists who boast about their connections to the British royal family, the hapless Windsors, and who do not see, or do not care about, the fundamental incompatibility between their cherished goal of dynastic succession, of Presidents Bush beyond number, and the American ideal of freedom from hereditary aristocracies. They seem to have forgotten, if they ever knew, that the American Revolution was fought against just the sort of rule by birthright they now seek to impose, and that the iconic George Washington refused to be crowned king. Phillips's repeated use of the term restoration to describe the presidencies of the two George Bushes is not casual and captures the basic horror of a family that clearly regards the country as a kind of supersized SUV to which only they rightfully hold the keys.

The good news, which Phillips often touches on without striking directly, is that the presidency of George W. has been so calamitous and one-term-ish – disastrous war, disastrous economy, alienated international community, infuriated opposition party – as to imperil the family's dynastic ambitions. With any luck, King George will remain firmly a figure of the distant past.

Paul Reidinger