[Mb-civic] When a Republican Says this Administration Is, Lost...

[Jim Burns]

'AMERICAN THEOCRACY,' BY KEVIN PHILLIPS

"Clear and Present Dangers"  
 
Review by ALAN BRINKLEY
New  York Times Book Review
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


AMERICAN THEOCRACY
The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in
the 21st Century.
By Kevin Phillips. 
462 pp. Viking. $26.95.  



© Copyright 2006 New York Times