Phillips' focus on economics reveals that he views the connection between economic decline and political protest as very simple--even intuitive. He says, for example:

[A]s the 1980s boom crested, rising taxes and other costs were gobbling up much of the national income gain of the middle class, while public services and the governmental safety net were starting to deteriorate. By the end of the decade, these economic effects were producing political unrest.

The actor remains unclear in Phillips' passive voice: By what means do economic effects "produce" something? He seems to say it creates "frustration," which leads to group behavior. This circularity doesn't tell us much: Why does frustration lead to group behavior? What does "frustration" mean? The debate over collective action is far from this simple, and Phillips merely skates over the complexities.

Why, for instance, did anger top the boiling point in 1992 and not before? The stagnation of wages and shifting of tax burdens onto the middle class were largely in place by 1988, and yet a very patrician George Bush won handily.

Phillips must turn to elite behavior to explain the absence of populist insurgency before 1992. He says Dukakis did not emphasize populist themes even as the Republicans, "mindful of popular psychologies," ripped him into tiny capital-L Liberal shreds.

Apparently "popular psychologies" aren't responsive to harsh economic conditions unless elites point them out. Clinton, he says, "developed a strong message about 1980s favoritism to the top one percent and unfairness to the middle class" and so "quickly became the Democratic front-runner." According to Phillips, Bush, as the "scion of a prominent investment banking family," didn't have Reagan's populist credential to counter Clinton's message, and consequently failed to win reelection.

Unfortunately, the very fact that Phillips must turn to elite behavior in order to explain mass actions disrupts his clean connection between economics and politics. If hard times explained political protest, elections would not be subject to the whims of campaigning and electioneering.

But Phillips holds firm to his simplicities, and his book is the worse for it.

It's obvious that large chunks of Boiling Point were written after the November election, which provided Phillips with just two months to meet his late January publication date. The writing suffers for it.

Its sometimes tortuous wordsmithing aside, Boiling Point provides a quick way to review the economics of middle-class decline. Still, readers who are looking for a well-rounded conception of political motivation in 1990s America won't find much here.