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

[Rick Buford <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

So....you're simply posting an article that agrees with your views?

Rick

Mike Miller wrote:
> 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.


--
We simply can't idiot-proof everything. Sometimes the idiots just have 
to suffer and die.
--http://www.overheardintheoffice.com/

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