He was a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Harper's Magazine, and National Public Radio, and was a political analyst on PBS's NOW with Bill Moyers.
Phillips briefly worked in the Department of Justice during the Nixon administration, but later left to embark on a career as an author and commentator.
Claiming that the Watergate scandal had dealt a fatal blow to his vision for a perpetual Republican majority, he was a critic of expanding wealth inequality under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and was a staunch opponent of George W. Bush's administration, which he extensively criticized in his 2006 book American Theocracy.
Dr. Allen Dwight Callahan [4] states the book's theme is that the Republican Party (GOP), religious fundamentalism, petroleum, and borrowed money are an "Unholy Alliance.
American Theocracy, "presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness.
"[6] The New York Times wrote:He identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world.
If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.
This triple play created new wealth to take the place of that destroyed in the 2000-2002 stock-market crash and simultaneously raised consumer confidence.
Instead of a recovery orchestrated by Congress and the White House and aimed at the middle- and bottom-income segments, this one was directed by an appointed central banker, a man whose principal responsibility was to the banking system.
The Fed's policies, however shrewd, were not rooted in an abstraction of the national interest but in pursuit of its statutory mandate to protect the U.S. banking and payments system, now inseparable from the broadly defined financial services sector.
The New York Times Book Review wrote "It is not without polemic, but unlike many of the more glib and strident political commentaries of recent years, it is extensively researched and frighteningly persuasive..."[8] The Chicago Sun-Times wrote "Overall, Phillips' book is a thoughtful and somber jeremiad, written throughout with a graceful wryness... a capstone to his life's work.
[1] A resident of Naples, Florida, he died from complications of Alzheimer's disease at a hospice facility near his home on October 9, 2023, at the age of 82.