'AMERICAN THEOCRACY,' BY KEVIN PHILLIPS

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."

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.