


by Kevin Phillips

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From the writer called our "modern-day Tom Paine,"an explosive analysis of the axis of religion, politics, and fiscal imprudence that threatens to destroy the nation.

Unabridged CDs - 11 CDs, 13 hours

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780786286935
Publisher: Gale Group
Publication date: 06/21/2006
Series: Thorndike Nonfiction Series
Edition description: Large Print
Pages: 777
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Kevin Phillips, a former Republican strategist, has been a political and economic commentator for more than three decades. His thirteen books include the New York Times bestsellers American Dynasty, The Politics of Rich and Poor, and Wealth and Democracy.

Read an Excerpt


The American people are not fools. That is why pollsters, inquiring during the last forty years whether the United States was on the right track or the wrong one, have so often gotten the second answer: wrong track. That was certainly the case again as the year 2005 closed out.

Because survey takers do not always pursue explanations, this book will venture some. Reckless dependency on shrinking oil supplies, a milieu of radicalized (and much too influential) religion, and a reliance on borrowed money debt, in its ballooning size and multiple domestic and international deficits now constitute the three major perils to the United States of the twenty-first century.

Shouldn't war and terror be on the list? Yes and they are, one step removed. Both derive much of their current impetus from the incendiary backdrop of oil politics and religious fundamentalism, in Islam as well as the West. Despite pretensions to motivations such as liberty and freedom, petroleum and its geopolitics have dominated Anglo-American activity in the Middle East for a full century. On this, history could not be more clear.


The financialization of the United States economy over the last three decades in the 1990s the finance, real-estate, and insurance sector overtook and then strongly passed manufacturing as a share of the U.S. gross domestic product is an ill omen in its own right. However, its rise has been closely tied to record levels of debt and to the powerful emergence of a debt-and-credit industrial complex. Excessive debt in the twenty-first-century United States is on its way to becoming the global Fifth Horseman, riding close behind war, pestilence, famine, and fire.

This book's title, American Theocracy, sums up a potent change in this country's domestic and foreign policy making religion's new political prowess and its role in the projection of military power in the Middle Eastern Bible lands that most people are just beginning to understand. We have had theocracies in North America before in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah but except in their earliest beginnings, they lacked the intensity of those in Europe, such as John Calvin's Geneva or the Catholic Spain of the Inquisition.

Indeed, most of the Christian theocracies touched on by historians shared two unusual and virtually defining characteristics. First, they were very small in geographic terms. Second, and more important, they were the demographic results of migrations by true believers. The population of John Calvin's sixteenth-century Geneva was swollen by French Protestant refugees, and the Dutch Reformed Calvinists of the Netherlands got a kindred infusion from Flemish refugees fleeing Spanish-controlled Antwerp. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, in turn, was built by English Puritan emigrants, and the nineteenth-century Mormons in Utah represented still another Zion-bound migration. As for Spain, despite militant Catholicism and the infamous Inquisition, it was too large and varied a nation to fit the small-scale theocratic pattern. Seventeenth-century attempts to shut down Spanish theaters, gambling houses, and brothels failed, and the golden age of Spanish literature and art from Cervantes to El Greco flourished in Toledo and Madrid under court, church, and noble patronage despite periodic homosexual reports and scandals that the Inquisition did not greatly pursue.1

Theocracy in America is of this lesser breed. The United States is too big and too diverse to resemble the Massachusetts Bay Colony of John Winthrop or sixteenth-century Geneva or even nineteenth-century Utah. A leading world power such as the United States, with almost three hundred million people and huge international responsibilities, goes about as far in a theocratic direction as it can when it satisfies the unfortunate criteria on display in Washington circa 2005: an elected leader who believes himself in some way to speak for God, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers and seeks to mobilize the churches, the conviction of many voters in that Republican party that government should be guided by religion, and on top of it all, White House implementation of domestic and international political agendas that seem to be driven by religious motivations and biblical worldviews. All of these factors and many more are discussed at length in part 2 of this book.

The three threats emphasized in these pages could stand on their own as menaces to the Republic. History, however, provides a further level of confirmation. Natural resources, religious excess, wars, and burgeoning debt levels have been prominent causes of the downfall of the previous leading world economic powers. The United States is hardly the first, and we can profit from the examples of what went wrong before.

Oil, as everyone knows, became the all-important fuel of American global ascendancy in the twentieth century. But before that, nineteenth-century Britain was the coal hegemon and seventeenth-century Dutch fortune harnessed the winds and the waters. Neither nation could maintain its global economic leadership when the world moved toward a new energy regime. Today's United States, despite denials, has obviously organized much of its overseas military posture around petroleum, protecting oil fields, pipelines, and sea lanes.


The political corollary fascinating but appalling is the recent transformation of the Republican presidential coalition. Since the elections of 2000 and especially of 2004, three pillars have become increasingly central: (1) the oilnational security complex, with its pervasive interests; (2) the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and (3) the debt-dealing financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street. In December 2004 The New York Times took up the term ìborrower-industrial complexî to identify one profitable engine of exploding consumer debt.

That name does not quite work, but we can hardly use a term like the credit-card/mortgage/auto-loan/corporate-debt/federal-borrowing industrial complex. This is a problem still searching for its Election Day Halloween mask. In any event, the rapid ballooning of government, corporate, financial, and personal debt over the last four decades goes a long way to explain why the finance sector, debt's toll collector, has swollen to outweigh the manufacture of real goods. We are in the midst of one of America's most perverse transformations.

George W. Bush has promoted these alignments, interest groups, and their underpinning values. His family, over multiple generations, has been tied to a politics that conjoined finance, national security, and oil. In recent decades, operating from the federal executive branch, the Bushes have added close ties to evangelical and fundamentalist power brokers of many persuasions. These origins, biases, and practices were detailed in my last book, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (2004). The present volume, therefore, revisits mostly the family's influence in helping these trends and guiding these constituencies.

Over three decades of Bush presidencies, vice presidencies, and CIA directorships, the Republican party has slowly become the vehicle of all three interests a fusion of petroleum-defined national security; a crusading, simplistic Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding financial complex. The three are increasingly allied in commitment to Republican politics, if not in full agreement with one another. On the most important front, I am beginning to think that the southern-dominated, biblically driven Washington GOP represents a rogue coalition, like the southern, proslavery politics that controlled Washington until Lincoln's election in 1860.

But the national Democrats have their own complicity. Their lack of understanding and moxie has contributed to the mutation of the GOP. Without that weak and muddled opposition, both before and after September 11, the Republican transformation would have been impolitic and perhaps impossible.

Clearly the pitfalls of petro-politics, radical religion, and debt finance have to be addressed in their own right. However, I have a personal concern over what has become of the Republican coalition. Forty years ago, I began a book, finished in 1967 and taken to the 1968 Republican presidential campaign, for which I became the chief political and voting-patterns analyst. Published in 1969, while I was still in the fledgling Nixon administration, The Emerging Republican Majority became highly controversial. Newsweek identified it as ìThe political bible of the Nixon Era.î

In that book I coined the term ìSun Beltî to describe the oil, military, aerospace, and retirement country that stretched from Florida to California, but debate concentrated on the argument since fulfilled and then some that the South was on its way into the national Republican party. Four decades later, this framework has produced the triple mutation that this book will discuss.

Some of that evolution was always implicit. If any region of the United States had the potential to produce a high-powered, crusading fundamentalism, it was Dixie. If any new alignment had the potential to nurture a fusion of oil interests and the military-industrial complex, it was the Sun Belt that helped to draw them into commercial and political proximity and collaboration. Wall Street, of course, has long been part of the GOP coalition. On the other hand, members of the Downtown Association and the Links Club were never enthusiastic about ìJoe Sixpackî and middle America, to say nothing of preachers such as Oral Roberts or the Tupelo, Mississippi, Assemblies of God. The new cohabitation is an unnatural one.

Little was said about oil in The Emerging Republican Majority, partly because I knew I would be in the government when the book appeared. Still, oilmen liked its political thesis, and I fleshed out an analysis still relevant today that the nation's oil, coal, and natural-gas sections, despite their intramural differences, would be regional mainstays of the new ìheartlandî-centered GOP national coalition. Hitherto, these interests had been divided by the political Mason-Dixon Line. That division would and did end.

While studying economic geography and history in Britain some years earlier, I had been intrigued by the Eurasian ìheartlandî theory of Sir Halford Mackinder, a prominent early-twentieth-century geographer. Control of the heartland, Mackinder argued, would determine control of the world. In North America, I thought the coming together of a heartland across fading Civil War lines would determine control of Washington.

Wordsmith William Safire, in his The New Language of Politics entry on the heartland, cited Mackinder. He then noted that ìpolitical analyst Kevin Phillips applied the old geopolitical word to U.S. politics in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority: ëTwenty-one of the twenty-five Heartland states supported Richard Nixon in 1968. . . . Over the remainder of the century, the Heartland should dominate American politics in tandem with suburbia, the South and Sun Beltswayed California.'î2

This was the prelude to today's ìred states.î Mackinder's worldview has its own second wind because his Eurasian cockpit has reemerged as the pivot of the international struggle for oil. In a similar context, the American heartland, from Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico to Ohio and the Appalachian coal states, has become (along with the rest of the onetime Confederacy) the seat of a fossil-fuels political alliance an electoral hydrocarbon coalition. It cherishes SUVs and easy carbon dioxide emissions policy, and applauds preemptive U.S. air strikes on uncooperative, terrorist-coddling Persian Gulf countries fortuitously blessed with huge reserves of oil.

Because the United States is beginning to run out of its own oil sources, a military solution to an energy crisis is hardly lunacy. Neither Caesar nor NapolÈon would have flinched, and the temptation, at least, is understandable. What Caesar and NapolÈon did not face, but less able American presidents do, is that bungled overseas military embroilment, unfortunate in its own right, could also boomerang economically. The United States, some $4 trillion in hock internationally, has become the world's leading debtor, increasingly nagged by worry that some nations will sell dollars in their reserves and switch their holdings to rival currencies. Washington prints bonds and dollar-green IOUs, which European and Asian bankers accumulate until for some reason they lose patience. This is the debt Achilles' heel, which stands alongside the oil Achilles' heel.

Unfortunately, as much or more dynamite hides in the responsiveness of the new GOP coalition to Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Pentecostals, who muster some 40 percent of the party electorate. Many, many millions believe that the Armageddon described in the Bible is coming soon. Chaos in the explosive Middle East, far from being a threat, actually heralds the awaited second coming of Jesus Christ. Oil-price spikes, murderous hurricanes, deadly tsunamis, and melting polar ice caps lend further credence.

The potential interaction between the end-times electorate, inept pursuit of Persian Gulf oil, Washington's multiple deceptions, and the credit and financial crisis that could follow a substantial liquidation by foreign holders of U.S. bonds is the stuff of nightmares. To watch U.S. voting patterns enable such policies the GOP coalition is unlikely to turn back is depressing to someone who spent many years researching, watching, and cheering those grass roots.

Four decades ago, although The Emerging Republican Majority said little about southern fundamentalists and evangelicals, the new GOP coalition seemed certain to enjoy a major infusion of conservative northern Catholics and southern Protestants. This troubled me not at all. During the 1970s and part of the 1980s, I agreed with the predominating Republican argument that ìsecularî liberals, by badly misjudging the depth and importance of religion in the United States, had given conservatives a powerful and legitimate electoral opportunity.

Since then, my appreciation of the intensity of religion in the United States has deepened. Its huge carryover from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries turns out to have seeded a similar evangelical wave in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In 1998, after years of research, I published The Cousins' Wars, a lengthy study of the three great English-speaking internal convulsions the English Civil War of the 1640s, the American Revolution, and the American War Between the States. Amid each fratricide, religious divisions figured so strongly in people's choosing sides that persisting threads became clear pietists and puritans versus high-church adherents, and a recurrent conviction by militant evangelicals, from the 1640s to the 1860s, culminating in the American Civil War, that theirs was the cause of liberty and the Protestant Reformation. The overall analysis and its documentation were taken seriously enough that the book became a finalist for that year's Pulitzer Prize in history. Indeed, my wife and I were sufficiently impressed by the historical roles of the scores of eighteenth-century churches we visited from the pastel Caribbean stuccos of Anglican South Carolina to the stone fortresses of Presbyterian Pennsylvania and the white Congregational meetinghouses of New England to think of writing a book on them sometime (we still do).

Such was religion's enduring importance in the United States when it was trod upon in the 1960s and thereafter by secular advocates determined to push Christianity out of the public square, a mistake that unleashed an evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal counterreformation that in some ways is still building. As part 2 will explore, strong theocratic pressures are already visible in the Republican national coalition and its leadership, while the substantial portion of Christian America committed to theories of Armageddon and the inerrancy of the Bible has already made the GOP into America's first religious party.

Its religiosity reaches across the board from domestic policy to foreign affairs. Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq, widely anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon, the Republican coalition's clash with science has seeded half a dozen controversies. These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global population planning, derogation of women's rights, opposition to stem-cell research, and so on. This suggests that U.S. society and politics may again be heading for a defining controversy such as the Scopes trial of 1925. That embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a generation, but the outcome of the eventual twenty-first-century test is hardly assured.

Book buyers will understand that in these United States volumes able to sell two or three hundred thousand hardcover copies are uncommon. Not rare, just uncommon. Consider, then, the publishing success of end-times preacher Tim LaHaye, earlier the politically shrewd founder (in 1981) of the Washington-based Council for National Policy. Beginning in 1994 LaHaye successfully coauthored a series of books on the rapture, the tribulation, and the road to Armageddon that has since sold some sixty million copies in print, video, and cassette forms. Evangelist Jerry Falwell hailed it as probably the most influential religious publishing event since the Bible.3 Several novels of the Left Behind series rose to number one on the New York Times fiction bestseller list, and the series as a whole almost certainly reached fifteen to twenty million American voters. Political aides in the Bush White House must have read several volumes, if only for pointers on constituency sentiment.


Twenty years ago, The New York Times would not have considered LaHaye for the bestseller list, and my scenario of his writings influencing the White House could only have been spoof. Not so today. In a late-2004 speech, the retiring television journalist Bill Moyers, himself an ordained Baptist minister, broke with polite convention. He told an audience at the Harvard medical school that ìone of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.î4

I would put it somewhat differently. These developments have warped the Republican party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices, and become a gathering threat to America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive, even a partial captive, of the sort of biblical inerrancy backwater, not mainstream that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early seventeenth century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our solar system.

Conservative true believers will scoff: the United States is sui generis, they say, a unique and chosen nation. What did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that He was apparently not added a further debilitating note to the later stages of each national decline. Perhaps the warfare, earthquakes, plagues, and turmoil of the early twenty-first century are unprecedented, but the religious believers of yesteryear also saw millennial signs in flood, plagues, famines, comets, and Mongol and Turkish invasions.

Over the course of the last twenty-five years, I have made frequent reference to these political, economic, and historical (but not religious) precedents in several books, most recently in Wealth and Democracy (2002). The concentration of wealth that developed in the United States in the long bull market of 19822000 was also a characteristic of the zeniths of the previous leading world economic powers as their elites pursued surfeit in Mediterranean villas or in the country-house splendor of Edwardian England.

This volume, to be sure, is mostly about something other than wealth. Its concluding chapters in part 3 concentrate on the perils of debt, albeit that is also a financial excess. As we will see, wealth and debt have often overextended together in the modern trajectories of leading world economic powers. In a nation's early years, debt is a vital and creative collaborator in economic expansion; in late stages, it becomes what Mr. Hyde was to Dr. Jekyll: an increasingly dominant mood and facial distortion. The United States of the early twenty-first century is well into this debt-driven climactic, with some critics arguing all too plausibly that an unsustainable credit bubble has replaced the stock bubble that burst in 2000.

Unfortunately, as my subtitle argues, three of the preeminent weaknesses displayed in these past declines have been religious excess, an outdated or declining energy and industrial base, and financialization and debt (from foreign and military overstretch). The examples have been clear, and they thread my analysis in this book. The extent to which politics in the United States and especially the governing Republican coalition deserves much of the blame for this fatal convergence is not only the book's subject matter but its raison d'Ítre.

Table of Contents

Part IOil and American Supremacy
1Fuel and National Power31
2The Politics of American Oil Dependence87
3Trumpets of Democracy, Drums of Gasoline160
Part IIToo Many Preachers
4Radicalized Religion: As American as Apple Pie221
5Defeat and Resurrection: The Southernization of America285
6The United States in a Dixie Cup: The New Religious and Political Battlegrounds360
7Church, State, and National Decline449
Part IIIBorrowed Prosperity
8Soaring Debt, Uncertain Politics, and the Financialization of the United States539
9Debt: History's Unlearned Lesson604
10Serial Bubbles and Foreign Debt Holders: American Embarrassment and Asian Opportunity644
11The Erring Republican Majority698
Afterword: The Changing Republican Presidential Coalition779


An Interview with Kevin Phillips

Barnes & American Theocracy is subtitled "The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century." What's the book's basic premise?

Kevin Phillips: My thesis is that these are the three major perils of the United States in the early 21st century. First, radical religion -- this encompasses everything from the Pat Robertson–Jerry Falwell types to the attacks on medicine and science, and the Left Behind books with their End Times and Armageddon scenarios. Second, oil dependence -- oil was essential to 20th-century U.S. hegemony, and its growing scarcity and cost could play havoc. And third, debt is becoming a national weakness -- indeed, the "borrowing" industry in the U.S. has grown so rapidly that finance has displaced manufacturing as the leading U.S. sector.

B& Was there a specific event that spurred you to begin writing it?

KP: Yes. The narrow election of George W. Bush to a second term in 2004, which meant four more years of Religious Right power, over-dependence on oil and over-involvement in the Middle East, and the fattening of the debt albatross.

B& Have other historical superpowers faced the same obstacles that the U.S. faces?

KP: Indeed. From Rome to the British Empire, they all thought they were unique, that God was on their side, and that they had transcended history. Too much crusading, strutting, borrowing, luxuriating, and interest-group entrenchment helped do them in.

B& What role does apocalyptic fiction like that of the Left Behind series play in all this?

KP: Some 45 percent of U.S. Christians believe in the End Times and Armageddon, and the Left Behind series helped mobilize them and shape Washington awareness of their importance. Centrist religious leaders believe it's a gross distortion of the Bible, but there's no doubt that a large percentage of the Bush electorate believes that war and chaos in the holy lands (including Iraq) heralds the Second Coming.

B& Do you feel the expected scarcity of oil played a role in the decision to invade Iraq?

KP: Absolutely. Dick Cheney was very mindful of the coming shortfall, and during 2001 his Energy Task Force pored over maps of the Iraqi oilfields. The big U.S. oil companies were also desperate to have them, and since 2001, the U.S. military has increasingly taken up oilfield, pipeline, and sea route protection. But alas, botching Iraq botched oil relationships.

B& Why have Democrats had such a problem in attracting the Christian evangelical vote?

KP: Bluntly put, since the 1960s the Democrats have been the vehicle for the growth of secularism and irreligion among perhaps a third of the U.S. population. Strong churchgoers vote Republican for president by roughly 3:1. The new chance for the Democrats is to compete for the people in the middle -- occasional religious attendees and moderates -- who think that the liberals went too far in the 1960s and 1970s but that the Religious Right and the would-be theocrats are the danger now.

B& In light of issues like the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, the NSA's warrantless wiretapping of Americans, and the poor planning for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, why do Bush's supporters stubbornly cling to their high opinion of him and his policies?

KP: It's useful to divide Bush's supporters in two. On one side, the economic conservatives and centrist traditional GOPers; on the other, the true-believing religious electorate. He's lost many of the middle-roaders with his Iraq, Katrina, and Schiavo bungling, but as long as he has most of his religious voters, it'll be hard to push him below 35-40 percent job approval in the national polls.

B& Has the Bush administration exploited the events of 9/11 for political gain, in your opinion?

KP: There's no doubt. They have tried to polarize voters into seeing a fight between good and evil, stoking fear and a sense of global chaos. The doomsday preachers are on the same side.

B& Is the U.S. turning away from a belief in science-based problem solving, in favor of "faith-based" solutions?

KP: The majority of Americans have not turned, but there is a large minority -- certainly 25 percent, probably not 40 percent -- that want more Bible and less science, abstinence rather than contraception, fewer drugs and more faith (faith-healing), and uphold confidence in fuel supplies and resources because "God will provide."

B& You're considered a Republican -- are you concerned about the direction the GOP seems to be headed in?

KP: I'm an independent now. The Republicans started losing me in the late 1980s, and lost me completely with George W. Bush. In this year 2006, they're starting to show signs of change, but so far it's much too little much too late. One of our Republican congressmen here in Connecticut, Chris Shays, complains, flat out, that the party of Lincoln has become "the party of theocracy."

B& What's your (admittedly early) prediction of the 2006 and 2008 elections?

KP: The Republicans should be vulnerable in the 2006 Congressional elections, but so far the Democrats have been a lackluster and unimaginative opposition. As for 2008, that is too far away.

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American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century 4 out of 5 based on 0 ratings. 38 reviews.
Guest More than 1 year ago
It appears Kevin Phillips and Reagan-era conservative Bruce Bartlett, who wrote the recently published 'Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy', have a lot in common - both are longtime, die-hard Republicans who have gradually become more vocal critics of their own party. Their reluctance and resulting denunciation are borne out of their obvious mistrust of the current administration, which espouses values that coalesce into a series of irreparable policies that will linger far longer than Bush's tenure in the White House. A former Republican strategist, Phillips is the one who wrote the blistering intergenerational biography of the Bush family with 2004's 'American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush'. His tendency toward fact-finding remains consistent with this book, but this time, his scope is much broader than the power of a dynastic influence. The author systematically categorizes the triumvirate of forces that he sees are decimating the possibility of long-term economic recovery in this country. The first is our intractable reliance on oil, a dependency so entrenched in our daily lives that the Middle East holds court over us with their every political upheaval. Although the Bush administration claims the Iraq war is not about oil, Phillips does a meticulous job in delineating how it is completely about oil and how this represents a broader historical pattern of laying claim to energy resources not within our borders. The second force is the red and blue state landscape that has polarized the citizenry to the point where influential voting blocks are mobilizing based upon value-based judgments. Phillips illustrates how the ascendancy of fundamentalist religion is not a new phenomenon to the U.S., nor have there have been examples in our history which support a long lasting impact of religion-fueled politics on our government. In the most interesting part of his comprehensive book, he goes further with the current geopolitical tensions at work, specifically how the divide between North and South is as pertinent today as it was during the Civil War and that in fact, how that conflict was as much about religion as it was about emancipation. Much of the geographic analyses has been covered thoroughly in John Sperling's fascinating 2004 treatise, 'The Great Divide: Retro Vs. Metro States' and Thomas Frank's more scathing study of political disenfranchisement, 'What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America'. However, Phillips really makes the strongest case in illustrating how the current layout of blue and red states is really a compass for the varying levels of religious fervor in the country and that church attendance says more about political allegiances than current pundits are willing to admit openly. His arguments give credence to the indefatigable belief that many Southerners have in feeling they are the chosen ones who are committed to the idea of American imperialism as a means to spread their beliefs to a heathen-dominated world. At the same time, this is not a simple diatribe against the red state constituents as left-leaning liberals are not spared. Their inability to mobilize is put to task with almost as much criticality in Phillips' treatment. The third force Phillips discusses in great detail is what he labels the 'financialization' of the economy, in particular, the unprecedented scale of the national debt. Similar to the points raised by Bartlett in his book, Phillips provides further evidence of how the Bush administration has done little to restrain the growth of government in feeding into the first two factors and in turn, allowed the gap between the rich and everyone else to widen. This is the least surprising point raised by Phillips' book but still an essential topic to cover in order to paint the cohesive landscape he does here. Even though all roads lead to the Bush administ
SpinozaEK More than 1 year ago
Of course this book is not about refrigerators other than to posit the question: if refrigerator manufacturers have become so more energy efficient over the last 40 years, why hasn't the car industry? Of course the answer lies not in science, technology and/or engineering but in politics and the "Age of Disenlightenment" in which we are now engaged. American world hegemony has been preceded by that of Spain, Holland and Great Britain. What happened to those guys is now happening in America. And, yes, religion has played a part in America's decline. However, there is religion in the historical sense and there is an "American Theocracy" and both are now America's #1 export, or so American's think.
random_skeptic More than 1 year ago
Kevin Phillip's "American Theocracy" is a brillant analysis of contemporary politics and economics. He thoroughly discusses the recent trend in politics that is transforming the Republican party into a bastion of the Christian right and of fiscal conservatives who espouse outmoded economic theories. He also analyizes our country's over dependence on oil and the looming danger of continual government and private debt. He does so by providing historical evidence and by documenting numerous other reliable sources. This book is a wake up call to all Americans. We are truly entering into dangerous economic, political and social territory. In my view, it is important that we take measures now to make sure our country has a sound and secure footing for future generations. This book is an absolute must read!!!!
NanaTTX More than 1 year ago
This is a great book to understand the issues and attitudes that undergird politics in the Obama Era as they were inherited from the Bush and Reagan administrations. It is clearly written with great style and deeply researched. Phillips never panders or writes what cannot be verified independently. Should be read by every student of American History and everyone interested in repairing and restoring the republic.
Guest More than 1 year ago
With the pervasive influence of the credit market industry, religious right, and oil industry in the American process, we are heading for a huge downfall, according to the prophetic economic and political commentator Kevin Phillips. His timely prose compares our desires for a latter-day Manifest Destiny in the Middle East--a mistake tried by the motherland, Britain--to an ambitious empirical notion of both overreach and grandiose notions that we are the 'chosen people.' Like his other book Wealth and Democracy, he singles out the threat of foreign banks and lenders destroying asset accreditation and ballooning our current-account deficit, especially to those of China--the next superpower if we do not stop our reckless ways. He singles out the peculiar nature of the religiosity, fierceness, and fecundity of the Scots-Irish, who seem to be the winners of the culture wars. He seems to recant in some ways of his Cousins Wars where he said that the traditional High Church Anglicans where the winners against Cromwell's lower churchers. Continuing on his religious and ethnic themes of politics, he notices that the Civil War culture of 'The Southernization of America' hasn't ended, much to the naiveties of liberal secularists. The winners, as he laments and grudgingly admires, are the profoundly tough and volatile culture of the Scots-Irish, who are among the finest warriors the world has ever seen. Also included among the losers of Anglo-America's sphere of influence, as he continues was Spain, France and the Netherlands, alongside the Irish, Native Americans, African Americans and the Germans. I would include the Mexicans, as well, because of the fact that many came from French and Spanish bloodlines. Of course, that may be an issue if immigration issues continue.
Guest More than 1 year ago
This outstanding book is the best study of the current state of the USA. Kevin Phillips, the vastly experienced American political and economic commentator, depicts the USA¿s economic and religious interest-groups and their effects on the Republican coalition. For this paperback edition, he has written a brilliant 40-page introduction updating his 2006 analysis. He shows how deindustrialisation is destroying the US economy. The debt-driven finance, insurance and real estate sector accounts for 21% of US GDP, manufacturing for only 13%. 44% of all US corporate profits come from the finance sector, 10% from manufacturing. Household incomes have not risen since 2000. Wages are 62% of national income, compared to an average 73% in the late 1960s. He describes what he calls the `oil-national security complex¿ and its `100 years¿ oil war¿. The USA, with 200 million of the world¿s 520 million automobiles, defeats conservation and energy efficiency. The USA consumes a quarter of the world¿s energy, but has only 5% of its reserves. Since 1998, the USA has been importing more than half the petrol it uses. A barrel of oil cost $3 in 1970, $10 in 1986, $30 in 2002, $75 in 2007. Non-OPEC oil will peak in 2010. So the US state wants to secure oil supplies from the Middle East, but in a classic case of imperial overreach, its efforts are counter-productive. White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay said in September 2002, ¿the key issue is oil, and a regime change in Iraq would facilitate an increase in world oil so as to drive down prices.¿ Pre-war, Iraq produced 3.5 million barrels a day, now just 1.1 million, ¿U.S. mismanagement in Iraq having only aggravated the oil-supply and terrorist threats¿, as Phillips writes. The war has caused most of the recent $45-a-barrel rise. Phillips also studies the USA¿s rightwing religious fundamentalism ¿ a toxic brew of Biblical inerrancy and born-again evangelicalism. It claims that we live in the `end-times¿, when the defeat of the antichrist at Armageddon heralds the second coming. It is anti-women, anti-science, anti-modernism and anti-Enlightenment. It opposes sex education, women¿s rights, contraception, stem-cell research and abortion. He shows how successive US governments have indulged the soaring debt and credit industry. They encouraged reckless credit expansion, blowing up the ballooning national, international, business, financial and household debts. Low-interest rates led to the credit-card boom, to exotic mortgages, derivatives (which the speculator Warren Buffett called `financial weapons of mass destruction¿), hedge-funds and debt instruments. Buffett also said, ¿Hyperactive equity markets subvert rational capital allocation.¿ Americans now owe more than they make. Finance firms are debt collectors credit card companies offer to consolidate people¿s debts, but once the debtor is hooked, the company can raise interest rates to 20-30%. No wonder that in Bush¿s first term (2000-04), there were five million personal bankruptcies and by 2006, the USA¿s total debt was $40 trillion, 304% of GDP.
Guest More than 1 year ago
You may not like what author Kevin Phillips says about President George W. Bush and America's current state. In fact, loyal Bush supporters may write off Phillips' views as paranoid left-wing poppycock, although he is a former Republican strategist who played a key role in Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. Here, Phillips unleashes a furious bare-knuckle assault on the Bush administration. He insists that it is setting up the U.S. for a mighty fall. Utilizing historical evidence to construct his case, Phillips postulates that the combination of America's crushing debt, dependence on foreign oil and conservative religious fanaticism is a recipe for disaster. Those who agree with Phillips' contention that 'history is likely to remember George W. Bush as one of America's most damaging two-term presidents' will be screaming 'I told you so!' as they traverse this tome. And yet, Bush backers should resist the temptation to dismiss Phillips completely. The book is heavily footnoted, but Phillips skillfully connects the dots, extracting information from hundreds of newspaper articles, scholarly journals and speeches to assemble a compelling presentation. Whether you are for Bush, against Bush or worried about the shape the U.S. is in, we recommend this well-researched, thought-provoking work.
Guest More than 1 year ago
I listened to Kevin Phillips talk about his book and found him fascinating and a Moderate Republican. Now I have read it and believe it is outstanding and should be required reading for all Americans. I learned more about why the Right Wing Evangelical Christians are terrible for our Country. Mr. Phillips explains in detail why we went to war with Iraq (Oil), too many Radical Religious Christians and the incredible deficit George Bush has run up. Again, American Theocracy is simply one of the best and should be thanked by everyone.
Devil_llama on LibraryThing More than 1 year ago
The author's thesis, that the joining of politics, religion, and oil can't possibly lead to a good outcome for our democracy, is hard to argue with. The biggest downside of this book is that it drags a great deal, particularly in the sections on oil, and gets too deeply involved in policy for the lay person the book is aimed at; however, the message is timely: if we continue to go down the path we've started on, we could very well end up with an oil-driven theocracy. The author speaks as a Washington insider, and for this reason, his voice carries a ring of authority.
nerichardson on LibraryThing More than 1 year ago
a smart, wise and dry look at issues that most commentors get a little to over-emotional about. The last section, on America's reckless economic short-termism is the least sensational but most disconcerting.
midlevelbureaucrat on LibraryThing More than 1 year ago
This is a fascinating look at the trifecta of oil politics, right wing religion, and the massive US debt society, brought to us by the Bush administration, that threatens to end the era of American domination of the world.
lriley on LibraryThing More than 1 year ago
And for my first non-fiction review we have Kevin Phillip's 'American Theocracy'. It helps of course if you agree with his 3 main premises (which I do--and as it happens I also agree with many of his minor ones too). Phillip's is definitely in 'mea culpa' mode. From my own vantage what I consider conservative viewpoints are not all bad things for instance No. 1 would be you don't buy things you cannot afford--or if you do borrow you do so with the object of paying it back in short order or that balancing your checkbook is a good thing. More or less this is a principle that Phillip's past as Republican party know it all would rest upon. So the 3 main principles are this--that the oil well has run dry (with the exception of Alaska) in the USA and has peaked in many other parts of the world but most notably not in Iraq which is the principle reason why U.S. troops are today patrolling the streets of Baghdad. The suggestion is there that the need for the more or less unilateral strike against the Hussein regime was to cut certain countries out when it came to divvying up the oil. Certain of the present president's and vice-president's past associations in the energy field are used to fill out the picture. An analysis that neglect in other evolving energy fields (such as wind, solar or even fuel based) may lead us in the future into what he describes as 'resource wars' which will be dressed in patriotic colors. Hard for me to argue with that. So does God exist or not? Good question. The next several chapters of Phillip's book pertain to the rise of a particularly pigheaded kind of fundamentalist christianity which Bush and by extension his political party pander to--even when it comes to pandering to absurdities. They are his base. They have kept him in power. Phillip's believes that many of them believe that the 'Anti-christ' is here right now and the Apocalypse is right around the corner. No doubt that there are those who are dim-witted enough (and I suspect I know some; but I'm not in any hurry to get to know these suspects better) to believe anything that their earthly representative with God's ear will tell them. Phillip's calculates the numbers of them and corresponds them regionally most strongly to the south and the southwest where the much more secular Democratic party is busy getting clobbered. Which brings us to borrowed money. The Asian countries in particular China have been bankrolling our economy by buying US treasury bonds. Much about these last chapters is about how currency is manipulated--how manufacturing and industrial concerns vital to the nation are sold off piecemeal as profits are being made chasing paper credits and debits around the globe resulting in a few people making vast fortunes while less and less goes back to the population as a whole. Paralells are drawn here to other so-called world powers of the past (Spain In I believe its Golden Age; Holland which replaced it and in fact was replaced by Great Britain as the principal world power of the 18th and 19th century); countries also intent on de-industrializing while financializing their economies which Phillips contends (and to which I agree) is a recipe for disaster. A couple other points he makes--that the policy of an unregulated Adam Smith type of free trade Capitalism is not going to work--that it does not bring costs down but leaves the population at the mercy of for instance the health care or energy industries just for two. That social safety net programs (demonized as socialism) while anathema to those of the religious right and the above mentioned free trade capitalists are essential to a nations' well being and part of the nations' fabric.To finish off is the idea posited that a yahoo--any yahoo can spend his way to prosperity. So why not a country? Me too. One looks at our staggering trade deficit and then adds to it our staggering national budget deficit and wonders how in the world did this guy with a Harvard business degree ever get t
popejephei on LibraryThing More than 1 year ago
Brilliant and thorough. So thorough in fact that it's a long slog all the way through. So brilliant that it's hard to find fault with. This is the only book I've ever seen that combines the three big ideas that liberals stunned by their recent fall from power and grasping for causes to blame their fall on have formulated -- conservative religion, oil and ballooning debt. They didn't seem at all related to me, until I made it to the last page of this book-- now I have a hard time separating them.
klmccauliff on LibraryThing More than 1 year ago
Technically I "listened" to this book on cd. I really enjoyed it and found it very helpful in understanding the danger of our current political landscape. It gets a tad boring in places.
Clif on LibraryThing More than 1 year ago
Phillips' articulates the concerns of many Americans that are troubled by the current blending of American religion and democracy. He moves on to assess the dangers oil diplomacy and excessive national and household debt. This book was written before the current home mortgage crises, but it clearly predicts that the real estate boom spurred by the Federal Reserve cannot continue. That now appears to be an easy prediction to make. So why weren't the bankers smart enough to anticipate it? Read in April, 2007
JBreedlove on LibraryThing More than 1 year ago
One of the best non-fiction books I have ever read. A Nixonite Republican bemoans the overtaking of his party by southern religious extremists. He describes how the depletion of world oil reserves, debt, and the placing of religion over science in our education system is leading to the end of the American Empire as we know it. Full of historical comparisons. I read this during the great financial melt down of 2008. In the end its the fault of every American. We want something for nothing and we elected a fool (twice) who told us what we wanted to hear.
kasualkafe on LibraryThing More than 1 year ago
its incredible how accurately this book predicted the current economic realities we are currently experiencing , It was written over 3 years ago. This book makes credible arguments that oil and religion have been the focus of our politics at the cost to the american people. I mean , we went into Iraq for Oil and we didn`t even get it ...the chinese won the first contract. The direction and political decisions influenced by religion is staggering and scary. A worthwhile and eye-opening read. This book will not make you happy. It points out the ugly truths and trends in America which could lead to its demise. And the downside of the book is that there were no solutions ventured forth . I for one believe that with the new President and congress some of the issues this book sheds light on , Obama already repealed some of the religious fueled policies of Bush and we have our first study FDA approved trial of stem cells therapy. I believe that Obama`s focus , unlike the oilmen Bush and Cheney , is truly to ween us off of Oil and I believe the economy meltdown has put market forces back to work in the right way for that to happen. As far as the economy and debt , The economic recession has also radically changed the corporate financial landscape , Obama will push through more regulatory oversight to prevent such recurrence and we as Americans have no choice but to become savers not spenders and one can see this happening now as more and more retail stores shut down , and businesses cut back. We may raise our National debt in the short term but I feel that the painful corrections at home and in business are well under way. There is hope.
Niecierpek on LibraryThing More than 1 year ago
Kevin Phillips, a supposedly very effective former Republican adviser and speechwriter (1960s), argues very convincingly that the American empire is crumbling due to its overdependence on oil, unwillingness to change, consumer debt culture and religious fundamentalism. Very interesting and convincing, if overburdened with examples and repetitious. Definitely worth reading.
dlovins on LibraryThing More than 1 year ago
Just starting to read. Scope of narrative is impressive, i.e., tracking the convergence of petroleum interests, fundamentalist Christianity, and national debt, but sometimes Phillips's style can get too cute, e.g., when he writes that Texas in the '80s had become "the gleaming clip on three of the GOP's principal ideological suspenders: the Sun Belt, the Petroleum Belt, and the Bible Belt. As the Grand Old Party become Houstonized, Fort Worthified, and Wacoed, the state stopped voting for Democratic presidents" (p. 42). This kind self-conscious wordplay seems unworthy of an otherwise compelling analysis.As I continue reading, I stop caring about my earlier complaint. This really is an outstanding book. Frightening too, since, if correct, Bush is just the tip of the iceberg, and even dramatic "regime change" in the U.S. won't be able to stop our accelerating decline. One thing I hadn't thought about (or known about, really) before: our adventures in the Middle East may not be so much about petroleum as about petro-dollars, i.e., the seldom-discussed agreement with Saudi Arabia to price all petroleum sales in U.S. dollars (thereby making this the world's preferred reserve currency, which in turn supports America's burgeoning debt). Saddam's Iraq threatened to end the dollar's monopoly, according to Phillips, by officially pricing his oil in euros as of 2000 (p. 93) [the U.S. quickly reversed this in June 2003].
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