BOOK REVIEW : The Pauperization of the U.S. Middle Class : BOILING POINT Republicans, Democrats and the Decline of Middle-Class Prosperity : by Kevin Phillips Random House; $23; 304 pages

As Howard Jarvis once showed us--and as Bill Clinton may soon discover for himself--a panicky middle class can be a social high explosive. And as conservative pundit Kevin Phillips writes, “middle-class frustration politics” is its sputtering fuse.

“People were starting to sense that the so-called middle-class squeeze was really much more: a sign of America’s declining position . . . (and) a threat to their own futures and their children’s,” Phillips writes of the run-up to the 1992 presidential elections. “Middle-class radicalization and the politics of frustration were gathering force.”

Phillips is making another bid for political guruship, and he is counting on the fact that Clinton (and his would-be Republican successors) will read “Boiling Point” and take its lessons to heart. “Restoration of middle-class confidence and stability,” he pronounces early on, “is probably the key to the 1996 election.”

While Phillips has an impressive gift for spotting and defining the latest fashions in American politics, he’s hardly modest about his literary successes: “The Emerging Republican Majority,” he claims, was the source of Republican dominance in presidential politics that started with Richard Nixon; “The Politics of Rich and Poor,” he writes, was the “pivot” of the 1990 congressional elections and the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan.

Now Phillips gives us “Boiling Point,” a detailed and all-too-depressing chronicle of the pauperization of the middle class and its impact on not only electoral politics but also America’s very sense of its own destiny. Middle-class Populism, Phillips announces, will be “the new battleground of American politics--and perhaps of America’s future.”

Middle-class rage, according to Phillips, is a reaction to the grotesquely lopsided Gilded Age of the Reagan-Bush era. The Dow-Jones average skyrocketed while the value of farmland plummeted; middle-income families worked harder and longer for less and less; public schools deteriorated and potholes proliferated while Michael Milken pulled down half a billion dollars a year. An upper-middle-class manager earning a salary of $125,000 actually paid taxes at a higher marginal rate than a billionaire like Sam Walton.

” Somebody had profited enormously in the 1980s, with all that whipped cream and meringue in the financial markets, boardrooms and lawyers’ offices, and now somebody else--a lot of somebodies--would lose their jobs, pay higher taxes on incomes with lower real purchasing power and otherwise foot the bills for the decline that followed.”

“It was not,” deadpans Phillips, “an equal-opportunity decade.”

The plight of the middle class--which Phillips defines as “unaffordable housing, escalating taxes, deteriorating services, undereducated children, declining leisure and eroding purchasing power”--resulted in nothing less than “middle-class radicalization” and “a slow reshaping of middle-class culture.” Stirring a sea-change in American politics, Phillips writes, it has led to a new Populism.

“In the United States and Europe alike,” he warns, “popular fear of downward mobility has been one of history’s proven sources of political radicalism, both cultural and economic.”

Be forewarned--Phillips is an accomplished phrasemaker, but the wordplay and the sly humor are often buried in dense economic and statistical analysis, including some fairly daunting charts and graphs, and it takes a certain amount of willpower to make one’s way through the book. Phillips is capable of genuine scholarship, not just punditry, and he is prone to challenge the reader’s grasp of world history by, for example, comparing the crisis of middle-class values in the 1960s to “Holland’s 18th-Century ‘periwig’ era.”

Still, Phillips does not appear to be concerned about overtaxing his readership. He knows, from long experience and an impressive record, that his books are closely read by the movers and shakers, and he is probably correct in assuming that “Boiling Point” will be a best-seller among political insiders who seek to learn how to win the next election.

But Phillips clearly has even grander ambitions. “Boiling Point” can be read as a subtext to the headlines in today’s papers, but the book is also a somber warning about what can happen to a great power when economic decline turns into social rage. “It is a tale that has been told since Greece and Rome,” Phillips writes, and it’s clear that Phillips is worried (and wants us to worry) about the very survival of American democracy.