Review of American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Hardcover)

Author, advisor, and academic Kevin Phillips is a man of considerable intellect. In the late 1960s he penned a signal work ("The Emerging Republican Majority") that successfully prophesized the ways in which massive socioeconomic and demographic shifts in American society from a northern and industrial one to one more centered in what he euphemistically referred to as the "Sunbelt". In detailing this momentous transformation, Phillips made some then-startling prognostications how such a shift in population and potential electoral votes would presage the long-term shift to a more conservative and Republican-oriented political majority for generations to come. Of course, being a conservative Republican himself, he assumed that this development meant greater fiscal responsibility, more rationally-based international savoir-faire, and much greater social stability. Yet, as he admits in his latest volume, "American Theocracy", that is hardly what the record reflects having transpired in the intervening thirty five years.

Instead, in this calm, clear, and well articulated tour of the social, economic, and political territory with which he is so familiar, Phillips describes the contemporary topography of conservative republican rule as being an inhospitable and ungovernable landscape pocked by craters of ideological fervor, fiscal insanity, and unspeakable personal greed. In many ways, his well-articulated broadside against the political right is all the more damning because it is not only from a true believer, but also from an outstanding academic with a persuasive resume, a man who carefully documents and substantiates everything he cites, especially in this scathing look at exactly where it is that the 21st century's form of rabid Republican conservatism is leading us. Yet one does not find here so much a prosaic attack on the present Bush administration as it is a penetrating historical analysis of how we got to this point in terms of three frightening enduring social and political trends, phenomena neither invented nor originated by the present administration.

Phillips sees three interlocking tendencies as now reaching a critical point in defining and even threatening the future of the polity. First is the rise of the corruptive influence of oil on both domestic and foreign policy; second is the rise of an intolerant form of radical Christian doctrine into key areas of public life; and third, the incredibly irresponsible increase in the level of both public and private debt. Each of these trends threatens to undermine both the short-term and long term stability of the nation, and each in its own way is a key factor in the way that describes how it is that both the Executive branch and the Congress are becoming increasingly beholden to special interests and are increasingly undemocratic. In particular, the fashion in which President Bush and the Congress have used permanent tax cuts for the wealthy as a device to transfer responsibility for future debt away from the wealthy and toward those with less means and less political voice, while at the same time insanely increasing that public debt, defies both morality and logic. Moreover, Phillips finds that the ways in which these trends are unfolding makes us as individual citizens and as members of the larger collectivity substantially less likely and immensely less able to determine our own future in anything resembling a rational and progressive fashion.

In many ways, this book represents a kind of sequel to Phillips original tome in the sense that herein he once again provides for the reader the sort ofbroad structural perspective illustrating the ways in which social, economic, and political change profoundly impact the future for both society at large and individuals in private, personal existence. In so detailing the powerful fashion in which these three powerful trends relate to each other and how they combine to impact the nature of American society itself, how they tend to push the nation toward ever more limited and ever weaker versions of its former substantial self, he also offers the reader an opportunity to understand the true nature of forces around us that demand public action now. This is an unnerving snapshot of America at a fateful crossroad, at a point that even the dullest among us must begin to recognize the palpable dangers. With the publication of this thoughtful and thought-provoking book, we can no longer say no one has warned us. Enjoy!




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