CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

The enemy is us

March 12, 2006

BY WILLIAM O'ROURKE

Kevin Phillips, who informs us he has been "studying and writing about the emerging Republican presidential coalition for half a century," calls his last three books "indictments" of his subject. The first two are Wealth and Democracy, concentrating on how democracies are stressed when income gaps widen, and American Dynasty, his dissection and exploration of the Bush family. The newest is American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.

Using the word "indictment" was something he never would have imagined back in 1966, when he started writing his first book, The Emerging Republican Majority. Since then he has evolved from a staunch Republican who served in Republican administrations into a reluctant Republican critic.

In American Theocracy, the defendants are legion, or, as Walt Kelly's "Pogo" would have had it it, they are us. Of course, there are some specific bad actors in this latest indictment, but all the rest of us appear as enablers: "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."

 

POLITICS

AMERICAN THEOCRACY

THE PERIL AND POLITICS OF RADICAL RELIGION, OIL, AND BORROWED MONEY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

BY KEVIN PHILLIPS

Viking. 480 pages. $26.95

Much has been said and written about the ascendancy of fundamentalist religions across the world, the dominance of oil politics, and the growth of both debt and the income gap between the rich and everyone else. What hasn't hitherto been done is to show how all these subjects are interconnected, making clear not only the what, but also the why, how and who.

American Theocracy serves as an invaluable resource, given its marshaling of facts and figures, as well as the breadth and depth of its historical analysis. Phillips employs a historian's measured perspective and clarity of expression, though it is likely he will be accused of rank partisanship by those most stung by his analysis, those he labels "The Erring Republican Majority."

Phillips moves easily from academic scholarship to the popular press for information supporting his theme, which is that no explanation for the current state of affairs "can ignore the Republican party and its electoral coalition's" encouragement of "U.S. oil vulnerability, excessive indebtedness, and indulgence of radical religion."

The Bush administration claims the Iraq war is not about oil, but Phillips makes the case that of course Iraq is about oil -- since quite a bit of the world's history is about oil, or its larger category, energy. He explains -- perhaps more than some readers may want to know -- how the Spanish, Dutch and English lost their pre-eminence among, and domination of, nations: "Over generations, the world's energy leaderships -- seventeenth-century Dutch ingenuity with water, wind, and wood, British aptitude with coal, and the U.S. cleverness with oil -- have invariably developed related infrastructures of corporate, government, and cultural commitment. One generation's innovations become another's entrenchments."

As Phillips does with energy's role, he provides an exacting examination of religion in America, its precedents, factions and movements. Indeed, given the three-panel aspect of this book -- oil, religion, debt -- Phillips is able to make use of his own scholarship of the last five decades. He takes from his earlier books the pertinent parts -- and elaborates upon them -- to reinforce his new arguments. American Theocracy is, in this way, a capstone to his life's work.

Phillips has been able to see over the passage of time which of his notions and predictions have taken hold in the world. And he appears truly alarmed by those that have. What was barely mentioned in his first book, The Emerging Republican Majority, 40 years ago becomes in this one an entire section: "The Southernization of America." He admits that hitherto he had written "little about southern fundamentalists and evangelicals," and, by way of correction, they appear front and center in this volume. Phillips painstakingly shows how the Civil War may also have been a religious war as well as a war of emancipation, and how our current electoral map of Red and Blue America is just as accurately a depiction of America's church-going habits as it is of its political allegiances. They are, in Phillips view, one and the same: Even the "battleground or 'new border' states can also be located by a religious calculus."

There is plenty of calculus in American Theocracy. Phillips loves numbers and he supplies a lot of them as well as graphs and charts, each startling in its own way. Though he makes use of grand terms such as "Southernization," "Financialization" and "Disenlightment," he takes pains -- and pages -- to explain how each works. Phillips has braided his three unwieldy subjects into a forceful and provocative rhetorical whip. And he does lash out: "Never before has a U.S. political coalition been so dominated by an array of outsider religious denominations caught up in biblical morality, distrust of science, and a global imperative of political and religious evangelicalism."

Democrats are not spared: "The inadequacy of the Democrats -- every four years they seem to resemble the Not Ready for Prime Time Players who made "Saturday Night Live" a byword three decades ago -- complicates things but hardly excuses what the Republican party has become."

Over-all, Phillips' book is a thoughtful and somber jeremiad, written throughout with a graceful wryness. Its brilliance is so abundant even its asides are insightful: Phillips points out, speaking of evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal churches, "Broadcast, publishing, and direct-mail empires have grown up around these fellowships and communities, creating umbrellas against the effects of secular communications. The viewpoints of so-called sophisticates have little access to the minds of the faithful." Our Age of Information has become a new Tower of Babel: Individuals can pick and choose what they want to believe and still find many adherents to agree with them.

It will be a shame if Phillips' timely and important book is restricted to "so-called sophisticates." Everyone should have access to what American Theocracy so powerfully tells us about our country at this critical time.

William O'Rourke, a former Sun-Times columnist, is a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. His new book, On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir, will be published in April.