reviews

Time

Unholy Alliance: Kevin Phillips believes the U.S. is threatened by a combination of petroleum, preachers and debt

Richard Lacayo, Time, March 27 2006

It's been decades since it made sense to call Kevin Phillips a Republican strategist. The G.O.P. he used to strategize for, the one whose electoral triumph he foretold in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, got away from him a long time ago. The party it developed into, the one in which evangelical Christians carry lots of clout and budget balancers just about none, is not for him. With best sellers like Wealth and Democracy, about the widening split between rich and poor, and American Dynasty, which treated the Bush clan as well-connected mediocrities, he shifted to the role of ever more sour apostate. Don't expect him to be invited to the next Republican Convention, although it's not hard to imagine him standing outside with a sign warning against deficit spending, war for oil and the substitution of Scripture for science.

Actually, forget the sign. He will be getting the same message to more people with American Theocracy (Viking; 462 pages). The message is, bad times ahead. Writing in the spirit of Paul Kennedy's 1989 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Phillips is a declinist, and a persuasive one. Looking back to the collapse of the Spanish, Dutch and British empires, he has come to warn about a trio of threats to the U.S. that he believes is already taking it down the road to disaster, and not slowly.

One is the increasing domination of U.S. policy by the hunger for cheap oil in a world of dwindling supplies, which has led in turn to an obsession with projecting U.S. power across the endlessly volatile Middle East. Another is the spectacle of a Republican Party seriously under the sway of Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy, a reading of Scripture that inspires them to apocalyptic obsessions with that same part of the world. Finally, there's the headlong growth of American debt of all kinds--household spending, a massive trade gap and a federal deficit that leaves American policy susceptible to the foreigners who buy the securities that keep the U.S. government afloat, and who could sink it with the decision to stop buying. His analysis sometimes depends on strained emphases, and his career record as a prognosticator is mixed, but his book is an indispensable presentation of the case against things as they are.

Phillips believes there's no mystery as to why the U.S. went to war in Iraq. The reason was oil. His thinking goes this way. Geologists disagree about how long it will take before world production peaks, but not by much. Optimists give it 30 years, pessimists say five or 10. For a while in the 1970s the U.S. got serious, sort of, about energy conservation. Then it switched paths, driving an SUV right down the new one. Iraq, which nationalized its oil fields in the '70s, offered the prospect of a state with sizable reserves. For years American oil companies had their eyes on them. Then George W. Bush came to the White House ready for any opportunity to invade. Sept. 11 provided the opening.

And when the opening came, Phillips says, Bush was ensured a cheering section from those elements of the Christian right fascinated by "end times" theology--the belief in Christ's imminent return, and the prospect of Armageddon beginning in the Middle East- -popularized in brimstone best sellers like Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind novels. Phillips is convinced that many Americans underestimate the power of that idea among large parts of the electorate. For him, the G.O.P. has become the first religious party in American history, with a predictable effect on the White House policies on global AIDS, the teaching of evolution, gay marriage, global warming and environmental protection. (Who needs to take care of the world if it's coming to an end anyway?) Whatever you think about the influence of the LaHaye factor on Middle East policy, it's useful to point, as Phillips does, to polls suggesting that half of those who voted for Bush in 2004 believe in the word- for-word accuracy of the Bible.

The last part in his gloomy picture concerns the runaway growth of debt, and not just the massive increase in what you and I owe on credit cards and mortgages, although that opens the way to widespread defaults if the economy stumbles badly or real estate comes in for a hard landing. To cover its deficits in recent years, the U.S. became a huge deebtor in overseas markets. That kind of borrowing, Phillips reminds us, was a prelude to the collapse of earlier empires. "There have been no heavenly interventions on behalf of past leading international debtors," he says dryly. "The United States is on its own."

The Guardian

Apocalyptic president

Even some Republicans are now horrified by the influence Bush has given to the evangelical right

Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian, March 23, 2006

In his latest PR offensive President Bush came to Cleveland, Ohio, on Monday to answer the paramount question on Iraq that he said was on people's minds: "They wonder what I see that they don't." After mentioning "terror" 54 times and "victory" five, dismissing "civil war" twice and asserting that he is "optimistic", he called on a citizen in the audience, who homed in on the invisible meaning of recent events in the light of two books, American Theocracy, by Kevin Phillips, and the book of Revelation. Phillips, the questioner explained, "makes the point that members of your administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the apocalypse. Do you believe this? And if not, why not?"

Bush's immediate response, as transcribed by CNN, was: "Hmmm." Then he said: "The answer is I haven't really thought of it that way. Here's how I think of it. First, I've heard of that, by the way." The official White House website transcript drops the strategic comma, and so changes the meaning to: "First I've heard of that, by the way."

But it is certainly not the first time Bush has heard of the apocalyptic preoccupation of much of the religious right, having served as evangelical liaison on his father's 1988 presidential campaign. The Rev Jerry Falwell told Newsweek how he brought Tim LaHaye, then an influential rightwing leader, to meet him; LaHaye's Left Behind novels, dramatising the rapture, Armageddon and the second coming, have sold tens of millions.

But it is almost certain that Cleveland was the first time Bush had heard of Phillips's book. He was the visionary strategist for Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign; his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, spelled out the shift of power from the north-east to the south and south-west, which he was early to call "the sunbelt"; he grasped that southern Democrats would react to the civil-rights revolution by becoming southern Republicans; he also understood the resentments of urban ethnic Catholics towards black people on issues such as crime, school integration and jobs. But he never imagined that evangelical religion would transform the coalition he helped to fashion into something that horrifies him.

In American Theocracy, Phillips describes Bush as the founder of "the first American religious party"; September 11 gave him the pretext for "seizing the fundamentalist moment"; he has manipulated a "critical religious geography" to hype issues such as gay marriage. "New forces were being interwoven. These included the institutional rise of the religious right, the intensifying biblical focus on the Middle East, and the deepening of insistence on church-government collaboration within the GOP electorate." It portended a potential "American Disenlightenment," apparent in Bush's hostility to science.

Even Bush's failures have become pretexts for advancing his transformation of government. Exploiting his own disastrous emergency management after Hurricane Katrina, Bush is funneling funds to churches as though they can compensate for governmental breakdown. Last year David Kuo, the White House deputy director for faith-based initiatives, resigned with a statement that "Republicans were indifferent to the poor".

Within hours of its publication, American Theocracy rocketed to No 1 on Amazon. At US cinemas, V for Vendetta - in which an imaginary Britain, ruled by a totalitarian, faith-based regime that rounds up gays, is a metaphor for Bush's America - is the surprise hit. Bush has succeeded in getting American audiences to cheer for terrorism.

· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars

sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com

The New York Times Book Review

Clear and Present Dangers

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."Skip to next paragraph

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 .

The Chicago Sun-Times

The Enemy is US: And the republicans most of all, declares Kevin Phillips in his latest indictment

William O'Rourke, The Chicago Sun-Times, March 12, 2006.

William O'Rourke, a former Sun-Times columnist, is a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. His new book, On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir, will be published in April.

Kevin Phillips, who informs us he has been "studying and writing about the emerging Republican presidential coalition for half a century," calls his last three books "indictments" of his subject. The first two are Wealth and Democracy, concentrating on how democracies are stressed when income gaps widen, and American Dynasty, his dissection and exploration of the Bush family. The newest is American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.

Using the word "indictment" was something he never would have imagined back in 1966, when he started writing his first book, The Emerging Republican Majority. Since then he has evolved from a staunch Republican who served in Republican administrations into a reluctant Republican critic.

In American Theocracy, the defendants are legion, or, as Walt Kelly's "Pogo" would have had it it, they are us. Of course, there are some specific bad actors in this latest indictment, but all the rest of us appear as enablers: "Reckless dependency on shrinking oil supplies, a milieu of radicalized (and much too influential) religion, and a reliance on borrowed money -- debt, in its ballooning size and multiple domestic and international deficits -- now constitute the three major perils to the United States of the twenty-first century."

Much has been said and written about the ascendancy of fundamentalist religions across the world, the dominance of oil politics, and the growth of both debt and the income gap between the rich and everyone else. What hasn't hitherto been done is to show how all these subjects are interconnected, making clear not only the what, but also the why, how and who.

American Theocracy serves as an invaluable resource, given its marshaling of facts and figures, as well as the breadth and depth of its historical analysis. Phillips employs a historian's measured perspective and clarity of expression, though it is likely he will be accused of rank partisanship by those most stung by his analysis, those he labels "The Erring Republican Majority."

Phillips moves easily from academic scholarship to the popular press for information supporting his theme, which is that no explanation for the current state of affairs "can ignore the Republican party and its electoral coalition's" encouragement of "U.S. oil vulnerability, excessive indebtedness, and indulgence of radical religion."

The Bush administration claims the Iraq war is not about oil, but Phillips makes the case that of course Iraq is about oil -- since quite a bit of the world's history is about oil, or its larger category, energy. He explains -- perhaps more than some readers may want to know -- how the Spanish, Dutch and English lost their pre-eminence among, and domination of, nations: "Over generations, the world's energy leaderships -- seventeenth-century Dutch ingenuity with water, wind, and wood, British aptitude with coal, and the U.S. cleverness with oil -- have invariably developed related infrastructures of corporate, government, and cultural commitment. One generation's innovations become another's entrenchments."

As Phillips does with energy's role, he provides an exacting examination of religion in America, its precedents, factions and movements. Indeed, given the three-panel aspect of this book -- oil, religion, debt -- Phillips is able to make use of his own scholarship of the last five decades. He takes from his earlier books the pertinent parts -- and elaborates upon them -- to reinforce his new arguments. American Theocracy is, in this way, a capstone to his life's work.

Phillips has been able to see over the passage of time which of his notions and predictions have taken hold in the world. And he appears truly alarmed by those that have. What was barely mentioned in his first book, The Emerging Republican Majority, 40 years ago becomes in this one an entire section: "The Southernization of America." He admits that hitherto he had written "little about southern fundamentalists and evangelicals," and, by way of correction, they appear front and center in this volume. Phillips painstakingly shows how the Civil War may also have been a religious war as well as a war of emancipation, and how our current electoral map of Red and Blue America is just as accurately a depiction of America's church-going habits as it is of its political allegiances. They are, in Phillips view, one and the same: Even the "battleground or 'new border' states can also be located by a religious calculus."

There is plenty of calculus in American Theocracy. Phillips loves numbers and he supplies a lot of them as well as graphs and charts, each startling in its own way. Though he makes use of grand terms such as "Southernization," "Financialization" and "Disenlightment," he takes pains -- and pages -- to explain how each works. Phillips has braided his three unwieldy subjects into a forceful and provocative rhetorical whip. And he does lash out: "Never before has a U.S. political coalition been so dominated by an array of outsider religious denominations caught up in biblical morality, distrust of science, and a global imperative of political and religious evangelicalism."

Baltimore Sun

An American devil's brew of oil, debt and religious fanaticism

By Will Englund, Sun reporter, March 12, 2006

If you consider yourself a Southerner, a born-again Christian fundamentalist, an oilman, a hedge fund manager, or even simply the driver of an SUV, Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy should make you hopping mad, because in it he describes with fervid cogency just why he thinks you're part of what's wrong with the country today. As for the rest of us, well, we might come away even madder.

Phillips has written a denunciatory examination of what he believes to be the three big threats to American peace and prosperity: an unhealthy reliance on oil, a political landscape dominated by reason-impervious believers who make war on biology and geology, and the "financialization" of the economy, by which he means the horrifying profusion of debt and the financial institutions that feed off it. You might think that oil, political Christian fundamentalism and burgeoning debt have little to do with one another. But they all come together, in Phillips' view, in the White House of George W. Bush.

He doesn't exactly argue that these three lamentable factors feed off each other, and there come moments when you might find yourself in the middle of a pages-long essay on arcane debt instruments like CDOs or CDAs (don't ask - just be assured that they will leave you and everyone else impoverished in retirement) and suddenly you're wondering to yourself, "What again does this have to do with the fight over creationism?" No matter: Phillips isn't weaving an argument so much as dabbing a lot of colors on a big canvas, like an Impressionist painter. It's an overall effect he's after - and one that he largely achieves.

Phillips was once a political strategist for Richard M. Nixon, and the author of 1969's The Emerging Republican Majority. But disgust with the Bush family long ago turned him against his old GOP colleagues, and today he is horrified to see what has happened to the Republicans. Phillips makes a very interesting argument that the old North-South split in this country is far deeper and more ingrained than most people realize, and that one way of looking at American politics today is to say that the South managed the aftermath of its defeat in 1865 so well that it is now the dominant section of the country.

To Phillips, the "South" is defined by a culture and a way of thinking that expanded out of Dixie in the successive migrations of the 19th and 20th centuries. Citing all sorts of demographic surveys, he maps a present-day South that reaches north to somewhere just below Cleveland and stretches to the Cascades of Oregon. Portland was settled by New Englanders in the 19th century, he notes, and today is secular and Democratic. Eastern Oregon was settled by Southerners after the Civil War, and today is religious and Republican. The North, by his calculation, makes one small dip out of Pennsylvania, encompasses Baltimore and Central Maryland and reaches into the District of Columbia about as far as, oh, K Street.

Southerners, in Phillips' uncharitable view, believe that they are God's chosen people and that they can burn as much oil and bomb as many small countries as they want - and put it on the tab, please, because nothing bad ever happens to America. He draws parallels with previous failed empires - British, Dutch, Spanish - where people also foolishly believed in exceptionalism, and wonders why anyone can think that America will be any different.

England was propelled to the top of the world by the power of coal during the Industrial Revolution, superseded by an oil-driven America after the two world wars. Now the oil is running out. A botched war in the Middle East, rather than securing supplies, has instead put them at greater risk. Heedless, the U.S. continues to finance its consumption-obsessed way of life with money borrowed from thrifty foreigners. Some Christians believe that the end times are coming, so it doesn't matter. And which threat, of the three, is the most dire? Check out the title.

The good news, in Phillips' view, is that pernicious religious revivals don't usually last long, and they rarely survive national falls from grace (see what happened to the Church of England after it enthusiastically and martially supported the slaughter that we know as World War I). Cold comfort? I'm afraid so - when our oil pumps run dry, and our mortgages are foreclosed, it can't be any other kind.

Booklist

"Phillips is eloquent, absorbing and frightening, and this book will follow its predecessors onto the bestseller list."

Library Journal

"His warning of an ‘Emerging Republican Theocracy’ is sure to captivate media attention and draw many readers."