Review by ALAN BRINKLEY
Published: March 19, 2006
Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In writing "The Emerging Republican Majority" (published in 1969), he asked a very big question about American politics: How would the demographic and economic changes of postwar America shape the long-term future of the two major parties? His answer, startling at the time but now largely unquestioned, is that the movement of people and resources from the old Northern industrial states into the South and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the "Sun Belt") would produce a new and more conservative Republican majority that would dominate American politics for decades. Phillips viewed the changes he predicted with optimism. A stronger Republican Party, he believed, would restore stability and order to a society experiencing disorienting and at times violent change. Shortly before publishing his book, he joined the Nixon administration to help advance the changes he had foreseen.
Phillips has remained a prolific and important political commentator in the decades since, but he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th) looks broadly and historically at the political world the conservative coalition has painstakingly constructed over the last several decades. No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness. (His final chapter is entitled "The Erring Republican Majority.") In an era of best-selling jeremiads on both sides of the political divide, "American Theocracy" may be the most alarming analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have appeared in many years. It is not without polemic, but unlike many of the more glib and strident political commentaries of recent years, it is extensively researched and for the most part frighteningly persuasive.
Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. Instead, 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. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. 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.
The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production. Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory — that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the invasion.
And while this argument may be somewhat too simplistic to explain the complicated mix of motives behind the war, it is hard to dismiss Phillips's larger argument: that the pursuit of oil has for at least 30 years been one of the defining elements of American policy in the world; and that the Bush administration — unusually dominated by oilmen — has taken what the president deplored recently as the nation's addiction to oil to new and terrifying levels. The United States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips writes, "the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a global oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."
Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.
He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.
Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.
THE third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also, perhaps, the best known — the astonishing rise of debt as the precarious underpinning of the American economy. He is not, of course, the only observer who has noted the dangers of indebtedness. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, frequently writes about the looming catastrophe. So do many more-conservative economists, who point especially to future debt — particularly the enormous obligation, which Phillips estimates at between $30 trillion and $40 trillion, that Social Security and health care demands will create in the coming decades. The most familiar debt is that of the United States government, fueled by soaring federal budget deficits that have continued (with a brief pause in the late 1990's) for more than two decades. But the national debt — currently over $8 trillion — is only the tip of the iceberg. There has also been an explosion of corporate debt, state and local bonded debt, international debt through huge trade imbalances, and consumer debt (mostly in the form of credit-card balances and aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages). Taken together, this present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.
The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the work of many people over many decades — among them Alan Greenspan, who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt to avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most of all a product of the "financialization" of the American economy — the turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving and managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by the preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent rapture, which makes planning for the future unnecessary.
There is little in "American Theocracy" that is wholly original to Phillips, as he frankly admits by his frequent reference to the work of other writers and scholars. What makes this book powerful in spite of the familiarity of many of its arguments is his rare gift for looking broadly and structurally at social and political change. By describing a series of major transformations, by demonstrating the relationships among them and by discussing them with passionate restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing picture of national danger that no American reader will welcome, but that none should ignore.
Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost at Columbia University.
Reviewed by Christine Rosen
Sunday, April 9, 2006
AMERICAN THEOCRACY
By Kevin Phillips
Viking. 462 pp. $26.95
Few political strategists have relied so extensively on history to understand the American political system as Kevin Phillips. Often identified as a former Republican strategist, Phillips has made a career of charting his disillusion with the GOP in books such as American Dynasty , a blistering look at the Bush family. His latest, American Theocracy , continues this scrutiny -- with mixed results.
American Theocracy is three books in one. He argues that a "reckless dependency on shrinking oil supplies, a milieu of radicalized (and much too influential) religion, and a reliance on borrowed money . . . now constitute the three major perils to the United States of the twenty-first century."
His first worry is oil. "Over the last several hundred years each leading global economic power has ridden an emergent fuel resource into the pages of history," he notes, citing Britain's 19th-century reliance on the coal industry as an example. But such reliance can prove disastrous if that resource dries up, which Phillips believes will happen. Citing the more pessimistic of geologists' projections about declining global oil reserves, he argues that our dependence on oil has ushered in an era of "petro-imperialism" that spawned the war in Iraq.
Phillips is equally pessimistic about the emergence of a "debt and credit-industrial complex" that endangers the U.S. economy's foundations. "Historically," he writes, dominance of an economy by the financial-services industry, as has now taken place in the United States, has been "a sign of late-stage debilitation, marked by excessive debt, great disparity between rich and poor, and unfolding economic decline." He's clear on who's to blame: the supposedly conservative Republican Party, which, rather than governing in a fiscally responsible manner, has compromised the country's future out of both "ignorance of history and a classic onset of greed."
But as the book's title suggests, it is the religious right that most occupies Phillips. He is not subtle in his descriptions of this group: "The rapture, end-times, and Armageddon hucksters in the United States rank with any Shiite ayatollahs." The GOP has been transformed into "the first religious party in U.S. history," Phillips argues, and it is ushering in an "American Disenlightenment" that rejects the separation of church and state and ignores the teachings of science.
Much of Phillips's focus is on the eschatology of evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christians, including their understanding of the prophecies in the New Testament book of Revelation that describe the events leading to the world's end, events that some evangelicals believe may be foreshadowed by today's turmoil in the Middle East. "Conservative politicians understood that for true believers their imminent rapture and the subsequent second coming of Jesus Christ were the only endgame," Phillips argues. "We can estimate that for 20 to 30 percent of Christians, this chronology superseded or muted other issues," such as economic self-interest and the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But Phillips provides no source for this estimate. He also asserts, rather than proves, that such ideas animate the Bush administration -- worrying, for example, about "White House implementation of domestic and international political agendas that seem to be driven by religious motivations and biblical worldviews."
This seems due in part to the low opinion Phillips has of born-again Christians, whom he sees as victims of a form of religious false consciousness. He argues that "Some 30 to 40 percent of the Bush electorate, many of whom might otherwise resent their employment conditions, credit-card debt, heating bills, or escalating costs of automobile upkeep . . . often subordinate these economic concerns to a broader religious preoccupation with biblical prophecy and the second coming of Jesus Christ."
But contrary to Phillips's claims, speculation about the doomsday-era "end times" -- which has been present among certain segments of America's Christian population for more than a century -- does not necessarily lead to the embrace of apocalyptic economic or foreign policy goals. It does not even guarantee sustained support for war; the percentage of white evangelical Christians who back the war in Iraq has dropped from 87 in 2003 to 68 in January 2006, according to Charles Marsh, an evangelical professor of religion at the University of Virginia. To suggest, as Phillips does, that the Bush administration, at the behest of born-again Christians, is intent on launching "international warfare to spread the gospel" is astonishingly simplistic.
This tendency for overstatement stems in part from Phillips's reliance on questionable sources, including partisan radio networks such as Air America and books (such as Esther Kaplan's With God on Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy, and Democracy in George W. Bush's White House ) that are far from balanced. He also cites statements by self-appointed evangelical spokesmen like Jerry Falwell as evidence of the religious right's extreme views. But a survey conducted last year by the PBS program "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" found that most evangelicals themselves view Falwell unfavorably. Phillips is more successful with his summaries of religious history, where he relies on the work of well-regarded scholars such as Mark Noll of Wheaton College and George Marsden of Notre Dame.
Yet even Phillips must admit that in terms of concrete policies, the so-called theocracy he describes has been surprisingly ineffective at turning its agenda into law. "As of this writing," he concedes, "none of the half-dozen pieces of quasi-theocratic legislation drafted by the religious right . . . had achieved passage, but the time could come." In fact, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, white evangelicals' electoral influence is not on the rise; they constituted only 23 percent of the electorate in both 2000 and 2004. And the percentage of Bush voters who are white evangelicals remained constant at 36 percent in 2000 and 2004; as the Pew Center noted, Bush in 2004 "made relatively bigger gains among infrequent churchgoers than he did among religiously observant voters."
Still, Phillips sees the religious right's influence on nearly every major decision the Bush administration has made. He pins the invasion of Iraq not on the influence of advisers such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld but on the power of "the tens of millions of true believers viewing events through a Left Behind perspective." Whether discussing oil, the economy or American faith, when Phillips abandons his thoughtful explorations of history for the present, he produces polemics ill-suited to his talents -- seemingly written for an audience that wants its prejudices reaffirmed rather than examined. Years from now, historians studying the early 21st century will be able to judge how many of Phillips's dire predictions proved prescient. Lately, even the Bush administration has given lip service to the idea that the country needs to reduce its dependence on foreign oil. But in his disillusionment with the GOP, Phillips has allowed intemperance to infect his analysis. As a result, what could have been a thoughtful critique has become yet another book that caters to partisan passions. •
Christine Rosen is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and the author of "My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood."
Reviewed by Michiko Kakutani
Published: Sunday, March 19, 2006
The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century
By Kevin Phillips
462 pages. $26.95. Viking.
Kevin Phillips, a former Republican strategist who helped design that party's Southern strategy, made his name with his 1969 book, "The Emerging Republican Majority," which predicted the coming ascendancy of the GOP. In the decades since, Phillips has become a populist social critic, and his last two major books - "Wealth and Democracy" (2002) and "American Dynasty" (2004) - were furious jeremiads against the financial excesses of the 1990s and what he portrayed as the Bush family's "blatant business cronyism," with ties to big oil, big corporations and the military-industrial complex.
His latest book, "American Theocracy," the concluding volume of this "trilogy of indictments," ranges far beyond the subject suggested by its title - an examination of the religious right and its influence on the current administration - to anatomize a host of economic, political, military and social developments that Phillips sees as troubling indices of the United States' coming decline. The book not only reiterates observations made in "Wealth and Democracy" and "American Dynasty" but also reworks some of the arguments made by the historian Paul Kennedy in "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," dealing with the role that economic factors play in the fortunes of great powers and the dangers empires face in becoming financially and militarily overextended.
If Phillips does an artful job of pulling together a lot of electoral data and historical insights to buttress his polemical points, he also demonstrates a tendency to extrapolate - sometimes profligately - from the specific to the general, especially when making his prognostications of impending decline.
In analyzing the fates of Rome, Hapsburg Spain, the Dutch republic, Britain and the United States, he comes up with five symptoms of "a power already at its peak and starting to decline": 1) "widespread public concern over cultural and economic decay," along with social polarization and a widening gap between rich and poor; 2) "growing religious fervor" manifested in a close state-church relationship and escalating missionary zeal; 3) "a rising commitment to faith as opposed to reason and a corollary downplaying of science"; 4) "considerable popular anticipation of a millennial time frame"; and 5) "hubris-driven national strategic and military overreach" in pursuit of "abstract international missions that the nation can no longer afford, economically or politically." He adds a sixth symptom: high debt, which can become "crippling in its own right."
Phillips proceeds to show how each of these symptoms applied to great powers like the Dutch republic and the British empire in the past, and how they apply to the United States today.
He reviews how deregulation, the implosion of U.S. manufacturing, the rising cost of oil imports and substantial tax cuts have contributed to skyrocketing debt levels and trade deficits.
He argues - not altogether persuasively - that the Bush administration was pushed toward war with Iraq by Republican constituencies: energy producers worried about dwindling oil supplies; financiers worried that OPEC could end the dollar's virtual monopoly on oil pricing; and fundamentalist Christians, convinced that recent developments in the Middle East were signposts on the road to Armageddon.
Phillips adds that "the 30 to 40 percent of the electorate caught up in Scripture" has exerted a strong pull on the current White House and the Republican Party, driving the country toward what he calls "a national Disenlightenment" in which science is questioned, even defied.
As Phillips sees it, "the Southernization of American governance and religion" is "abetting far-reaching ideological change and eroding the separation of powers between church and state," while moving the Republican Party toward "a new incarnation as an ecumenical religious party, claiming loyalties from Baptists and Mormons, as well as Eastern Rite Catholics and Hasidic Jews," who all define themselves against the common enemy: secular liberalism.
Phillips blames the Republican Party and its base for spurring many troubling developments - namely, "U.S. oil vulnerability, excessive indebtedness and indulgence of radical religion" - that he says are threatening the United States' future.
Author Kevin Phillips, a former mouthpiece for the Republican party, turned more than a few heads in our nation's capital two years ago with the publication of American Dynasty, a scathing indictment of the Bush and Walker families and their century-long investment in America's energy, security and intelligence communities.
His postulate was that the Bush family's lengthy involvement with our nation's political system - first grandfather Prescott Bush, then father George Herbert Walker Bush and finally the son George Walker Bush - had turned our democratic system of leadership into a royal dynastic model based on the British system we dispensed with during our war for independence in the 18th century.
The charge was a potent one, given that Phillips was the author of The Emerging Republican Majority back in 1969, a prescient study of voting trends that predicted the Republican Party's current domination of American politics, a shift in political power he wholly endorsed at the time.
His new book, American Theocracy, takes his American Dynasty thesis one step further, predicting a confrontational crossroads, or meltdown, predicated on our nation's entanglements with fundamentalist Christianity, hydrocarbon energy and a colossal debt that's unmatched in human history.
And history is where the author takes us on his stupendously researched journey through the last 500 years of superpower history. Marshaling economic and political data about the life cycles of Spanish, Dutch and finally British imperial ambitions, he ultimately focuses his unsparing eye on America's emergence from regional industrial power to the current global hegemony that now rivals any civilization in history.His scope is massive and his analysis is a warning: Phillips sketches a future bankrupted by a nexus of religious, energy and debt concerns that leaves the world's remaining superpower helpless before emerging powers such as China well before 2050.Unlike a majority of America's distinguished journalists and pundits, Phillips takes as a given that 21st century oil and water resource concerns are the true driver of the War on Terrorism, not a desire for the spread of democracy or an end to tyranny."Oil has soaked deeply into the politics and power structure of the United States," the author writes. "More than a fuel, oil became a heritage and also the basis of a lifestyle."
As evidence, he relates the geopolitical maneuvers and military conquests of the Spanish, Dutch and British regimes that preceded our own on the global stage, showing how they were the means to secure commercial transit routes and continued power.
Another of the author's concerns is what he calls the 'Southernization' of the United States, the spread of formerly fringe religious movements such as Pentecostals, Baptists and other fundamentalist sects from the former Confederate South.
Phillips takes a lengthy detour in American Theocracy into Civil War history and posits that the defeated South actually won the culture war over a century later by conquering the minds, if not the territory, of most of the nation through religion.
He theorizes - thoroughly supported by opinion polls and other social barometers - that America's religiosity is a form of nationalism and indicative of societal decay, eclipsing and eroding the accomplishments of science, education and industry, the standard bearers that paved the way for the ascent of American civilization.
Phillips writes, "While sermons and rhetoric propounding American exceptionalism proclaim religiosity an asset, a somber array of historical precedents - the pitfalls of imperial Christian overreach from Rome to Britain - tip the scales toward liability."
He plainly details the other nations before us that saw themselves as "chosen" to promote a manifest destiny and also plainly relates their imperial collapses.
The death of industry is Phillips' last thesis in American Theocracy, as he relates our country's recent transition from an industrial-based economy to a financial economy, one where we don't make things, we just move money around.
The author marshals painful statistics about what he calls the "financialization" of the nation, including the breadth of our national debt, the treasury bonds we sell to competitor nations, the personal credit card debt of individual Americans, the trade deficit that he refers to as the borrowers-industrial complex.
"The armchair detective can easily figure out," Phillips writes, "that we are approaching a national transformation in economic vitality that past world powers allowed to their peril." His analysis of the financial breakdown of the Spanish and Dutch empires eerily echoes our own current financial situation.
The picture Phillips leaves the reader with is a dismal one, but cogently analyzed. He's a researcher at heart, and American Theocracy, like his previous works Wealth and Democracy, The Cousin's War and The Politics of Rich and Poor, compiles a mountain's worth of facts and tabulations, graphs and statistics to bolster each of his arguments.
The writer seems genuinely concerned and dismayed at the direction of American civilization, as our manufacturing sector slowly dies and is replaced by a financial services industry that he predicts will eventually outsource our most strategic resources to not necessarily friendly emerging powers like China and India, who are striving to outpace us in university graduates in science and information technology.
Perhaps the only fault in the book is a lack of analysis of America's predominance in the latter, the driving force of this new post-industrial Age of Information. The new, and old, mantra is that information is power and our nation dominates this sector, even if we do outsource our call centers to India and our manufacturing to China.
But Phillips' warning in American Theocracy is a strong one that should not be lightly ignored by those in power at our nation's capital.
Kelly Lemieux is a freelance writer living in Denver.
