[MLUG - DISCUSSION] [POLITICS][RELIGION] Clear and Present Dangers

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

As I've been saying....


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19brink.html

N.Y. Times
March 19, 2006

'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips

Clear and Present Dangers

Review by ALAN BRINKLEY

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.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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