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AMERICAN DYNASTY
Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush.
By Kevin Phillips.
397 pp. New York:
Viking. $25.95.

IF Howard Dean (or any other Democrat) is elected president of the United States this year, he (or she) will owe a debt of gratitude to Kevin Phillips. This may seem improbable. Phillips is, of course, legendary for his blueprint of Republican hegemony, ''The Emerging Republican Majority,'' published in 1969. Based on the returns from the 1968 voting and previous presidential races, it described how the rise of the Sun Belt and the suburbs, coupled with Democratic tone-deafness on social issues, was leading to a generation of Republican presidential dominance. The book was ''respectfully dedicated'' by Phillips ''to the emerging Republican majority and its two principal architects: President Richard M. Nixon and Attorney General John N. Mitchell.'' Even Watergate, which swept away his patrons, Nixon and Mitchell (he worked for Mitchell), was not enough to redirect the electoral flow Phillips had observed. In the years from 1968 to now, the Republicans have won six of the nine presidential elections (or five of eight, with one tie, if you prefer).

Yet across those years, Phillips, like so many Americans, has drifted away from his partisan identification. He says he is now more of an independent than a Republican, and his recent writing has focused in various versions on the gap in America between rich and poor and the ways it has been exacerbated, in his view, by the policies of Reagan and the two Bushes. News outlets still like to label Phillips a conservative. But his politics have certainly given more solace to the intellectual left in recent years than to the governing right.

And now the split is personal.

''I didn't like the Bushes when I was involved in G.O.P. politics before their two presidencies,'' he acknowledges at the end of his latest book. ''And now I better understand why.'' He is referring to the 333 preceding pages of ''American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush,'' a compendium of evils that he says have been handed down for four generations in the Bush family.

The book makes two basic and interlocking arguments. The first is that the United States has entered a period of what Phillips calls dynastic politics, in which the spouses and offspring of political figures are picking up where their relatives left off, to the detriment of democracy. The second is that the most important example of this phenomenon is not the Kennedys but the Bushes, who, beginning with George W. Bush's great-grandfathers, Samuel P. Bush and George H. Walker, assembled wealth and power by exploiting ties to Wall Street, arms merchants, the American intelligence apparatus and foreign dictators including Hitler. That wealth and power, and those connections, are why Bush is president today, Phillips says, and why his policies are what they are. Phillips finds the family fingerprints on everything from Bush's pursuit of Saddam Hussein to his leanings toward the energy industry, which, in the web Phillips weaves, are also related to each other.

''George W. Bush's behavior, far from being entirely his own product, is rooted in the dynasty's four-generation evolution and concomitant pattern of deception, dissimulation and disinformation,'' Phillips writes. Oh, sure, he adds, there have been other presidents whose relationship to the truth was erratic. He mentions Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. ''What makes the Bush pattern different, deeper and more worrisome is that it has been almost a century in the making.'' A reader is tempted to shake Phillips and say, aren't we all the products of our forebears? Certainly Hillary argued quite forcefully that Bill's imperfections were the result of his own family dynamic. But that would be to skip the heart of the book. When Kevin Phillips gets rolling, there is no one who makes more historical connections, conclusory leaps and just plain old sweeping statements that transcend the bounds of footnotes. They aren't always convincing, but they sure are exciting.

Phillips argues that dynastic politics has risen in the land on the force of two familiar societal ailments -- an infatuation with celebrity and a campaign finance system that favors the established and wealthy -- and one not so familiar tendency: a longing for royalty. ''National politics, in short, has begun to take on the aura of a great family arena. Of the four wives of the major-party presidential nominees in 1996 and 2000, two quickly gained U.S. Senate seats: Hillary Clinton in 2000 and Elizabeth Dole in 2002. A third, Tipper Gore, decided not to make a Senate bid in Tennessee,'' Phillips says. ''Other seats in the U.S. Senate, in the meantime, began to pass more like membership in Britain's House of Lords.'' These include a Chafee in his father's Senate seat in Rhode Island, a Kennedy in his brother's seat in Massachusetts and a Dodd in his father's seat in Connecticut. Both senators from New Hampshire are the sons of former governors, he writes (he doesn't mention that a Daley sits in his father's chair at City Hall in Chicago).

The ahistorical American reader should be warned that Phillips really loves comparisons with the history of Britain and Continental Europe. Everything from the Wars of the Roses to the return of Simeon II to Bulgaria parades by. But while there may be reasons to avoid this book, its erudition is not one of them. Most of the historical analogies can be ignored without prejudice to his central case.+And case is the word. For Phillips, a graduate of Harvard Law School, sets out to build a case here. ''If there are other families who have more fully epitomized and risen alongside the hundred-year emergence of the U.S. military-industrial complex, the post-1945 national security state and the 21st-century imperium, no one has identified them,'' he writes. ''Certainly no other established a presidential dynasty.'' Lest there be any misunderstanding, Phillips believes this rise is not just an interesting and undertold tale but a record of deceit, self-dealing, secrecy, crony capitalism and, perhaps worst of all, Ivy League elitism.

Let it be clear what this book is not. Phillips's publisher has wrapped it with a cover that seems to offer one of those fascinating multigenerational sagas of an American family. The Presidents Bush lean into each other smiling, while beneath are small photos of the family patriarchs. But Phillips is not a writer of history. He is an analyst of demographics and documents, voting patterns and capital accumulation. This skill with data is what made ''The Emerging Republican Majority'' so powerful. It makes this book feel off key. Phillips seems more at home with numbers and connections than with the motivations of men of power.

His tone is reminiscent of the muckrakers at the turn of the last century. When Phillips says plutocracy, I hear Lincoln Steffens from ''The Shame of the Cities.'' And the ghost of Ida Tarbell smiles over Phillips's shoulder as he traces in the New York City Directory of Directors the interlocking directorates that put George H. Walker, Prescott Bush, the Harrimans and the Rockefellers in control of companies doing business with the Nazi Reich and the Soviet Union. It's worth noting that Tarbell published her trustbusting history of Standard Oil in 1904, three years after the strike in Texas that set the gushers flowing that would ultimately fuel the rise of the Bush dynasty.

Phillips is correct that we do not yet have a full-throated history of the rise of the Bush family and that, given the election of two presidents in 12 years, this is a worrisome gap in our understanding. But he acknowledges that he has not done the research to write that: ''There are a few Bush cousins who might, in the right mood, be candid -- mostly disgruntled grandchildren of George H. Walker, the old buccaneer -- but in the end I did not travel that route.'' So what, then, are the untempered assertions of this book based on?

''Besides my own background of many years in Republican politics,'' Phillips explains, he read a lot of books, newspaper articles, Web sites and magazines. Readers can study the copious footnotes and form their own judgments about the variable reliability of these secondary sources. But what about Phillips's own relationship to the Bushes and how it shapes the book? What were those experiences of many years in Republican politics? He tells us only that in the 1960's he began to develop a ''distaste'' for ''what George H. W. Bush seemed to represent -- a career built on support from a vague 'elite' rather than merit or democratic selection.'' Beyond that, the reader will search in vain for details of Phillips's evolving view of the Bushes, and that is a shame. We are robbed both of whatever firsthand stories Phillips has to tell us and of any way to judge the credibility of his animus. What we are left with is a campaign dossier, full of fascinating items worthy of election-year discussion. A cynical view would be that his publisher knows that screeds sell (the best-seller list shows that the buying of political books is as polarized as everything else in politics). A more generous view is that he is trying to provoke the kind of debate about the Bushes he believes we should have started years ago.

Michael Oreskes is an assistant managing editor of The Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DE2DD1E31F93BA25752C0A9629C8B63