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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.

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