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American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips

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Dave_LF
Post subject: American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips
Posted: Thu 23 Mar , 2006 7:36 am
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This thread might end up getting moved to the Symposium.

The full title is: "American Theocracy. The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century". There's no way I could ignore a book that combines my three pet subjects, so I pre-ordered it some time ago and finally received it today (it's also published by Viking, which ties it to my fourth pet subject! :D).

Kevin Phillips is a Republican who served as a strategist in the pre-Bush days. He feels that the party has been betrayed by militarized oil politics, deficit spending, and coziness with the radical religious right. He doesn't really believe the US is a theocracy; the title was the publisher's idea. Rather, he thinks steps are being taken in that direction. He does claim that the US is probably as much of a theocracy as is possible in such a big, diverse country. Let me quote the first few paragraphs of the introduction:
American Theocracy wrote:
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 excesses of fundamentalism, in turn, are American and Israeli, as well as the all-too-obvious depredations of radical Islam. The rapture, end-times, and Armageddon hucksters in the United States rank with any Shiite ayatollahs, and the last two presidential elections mark the transformation of the GOP into the first religious party in US history.

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 US 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 Unites 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 Biblical lands--that most people are just beginning to understand.
I like to imagine that I have some sense of what ideas are "in the air". This one has been out there for some time, and I think having it down in writing from someone like Phillips is going to help it explode. Whether you agree with the premises or not, I think this book is going to be important.

I will post a full review when I'm done reading it, unless no one is interested (and I might still do it even then :D).

************************
* 3/30 - Review of Section 1 *
************************

This is part one of my three-part review. The book is neatly divided into three sections--one for oil, one for radical religion, and one for debt--so it seems logical to review it the same way.

First, general comments based on reading section one. The book is good. I recommend it. I'm already pretty well-read on oil issues, and I learned quite a bit. For a person whose knowledge of oil politics and economics doesn't extend much beyond the current price of gas, I suspect it would be one eye-opener after another. In addition, while I've heard many of Phillip's arguments before from the mouths of liberal Democrats or angry independents, they have a rather different flavor coming from the conservative Republican who played Karl Rove to Richard Nixon. My only complaint so far is stylistic--the writing is somewhat unstructured and often seems to go off on irrelevant tangents.

The first chapter is an examination of the historical connection between fuel and national power. Phillips argues that the three great Western empires of recent times--the Dutch, the British, and the American--all came to power by harnessing and mastering a new, locally-available fuel source. For the Dutch, it was wind and water, for the British, coal, and for the Americans, oil. However, a nation that invests heavily in an immature technology runs the risk of having its infrastructure fall into obsolescence as the field grows, and Phillips argues that this is precisely what happened to the Dutch and British (he notes that other important factors were involved as well). He then makes the obvious leap to post-oil-age America where our oil-burning power plants and heaters, aging electrical grids, 100-mile commutes, and car culture--all born in the era when Texas, California, and Pennsylvania were pumping out more oil and gas than we knew what to do with--are well on their way to becoming anachronisms.

This is not a peak oil book or even a peak oil chapter, but the theory is always there between the lines and sometimes in them as well. Several peak-oil authors are quoted or mentioned and several pages are devoted to M. King Hubbert and the US production peak of the 1970's. Phillips notes that, even if the true geological peak is several decades off, politics and instability are likely to impose an artificial peak long before that.

Chapter two examines the historical role oil has played in US politics. I won't go over all the details here, but suffice it to say that Big Oil's entanglement with the federal government didn't begin with the Bush family. Nevertheless, it's with the Bush family that things start to get interesting and the “Texification of America” begins in earnest. Reagan chose a Texas oil man, George Bush Sr., as his vice president. In 1988, both the Republican and Democratic tickets included “oil-savvy Texans” (Bush Sr. and Bentson). The '92 elections included Bush Sr. and Perot, another Texan with ties to the industry. Texas stayed home for the Clinton/Gore-Dole/Kemp election of '96, but Phillips argues (not altogether convincingly) that Gore is linked to oil as well.

In 2000, for the first time in US history, both candidates on the GOP presidential ticket were Texas oil men (Cheney moved to Wyoming to get around a Constitutional provision requiring the presidential and vice presidential candidates to reside in separate states). Phillips cites the Washington Post's annoyance with “the bizzare prospect of a presidential campaign in which three of the four candidates have intimate personal links to the oil business” (the third being Gore). He then goes on to examine the well-documented links between Big Oil and the Bush family, culminating with: “More than any other U.S. political family, the Bushes exemplify the interaction of oil interests, the financial sector, the military-industrial complex, and the intelligence community”.

Oil imperialism is the subject of chapter three, with the current situation in Iraq receiving the most attention. Phillips argues that Gulf War II is really just the continuation of a “Thirty Years War” that began in 1973 “when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and others in the cabinet promoted, just short of openly, a plan for using U.S. airborne forces to seize the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi”. Recall that Phillips himself was a member of the Nixon administration. While acknowledging that no large-scale government actions have single causes, he cites Gulf War I, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, Gulf War II, numerous covert operations, the various machinations in the former-Soviet Caspian states, and the overall posturing of the armed forces as part of a large-scale strategy for securing control over foreign oil (some of you may remember my “Cold War II” thread from Manwe. This chapter leaves me with little doubt that my thesis there was essentially correct).

Because Iraq has been so unstable for so long, its oil industry has rarely produced at capacity and much of the country remains unexplored. Some believe that Iraq may have more oil left underground than Saudi Arabia, which would make it the ultimate “strategic petroleum reserve” for anyone who could control it. In the words of oil analyst Fadel Gheit (ellipses Phillip's): “Think of Iraq as virgin territory...This is bigger than anything Exxon is involved in currently...It is the superstar of the future. That's why Iraq becomes the most sought-after real-estate on the face of the earth...Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath...You can't ask for better than that”. Phillips argues that the Bush Administration's true motivations for invading were (1) to secure the Iraqi oil fields for U.S. companies, (2) to ensure that Iraqi oil sales would be denominated in dollars, (3) to prevent EU, Russian, or Chinese companies from taking control of the fields first and denominating sales in their own currencies, and (4) to create new bases for US forces so they could be withdrawn from contentious Saudi Arabia without abandoning the Middle-East. I find his arguments compelling, though I had already accepted these conclusions before picking up the book.

Finally, Phillips wraps up the oil section by noting the extraordinary convergence of 5 “endgames” that appeared to be underway in 2001. First was the possible imminent peak in non-OPEC oil production. Second was the oil majors' need to acquire new fields in order to maintain profitability as old fields went into decline. Third was the fact that several OPEC nations were openly considering moving away from the dollar. Fourth was the possibility of catastrophic climate change (which the Department of Defense has studied in detail, despite the Bush administration's public skepticism on the phenomenon). Fifth and finally was the growing number of apocalyptic Christians who were expecting an end-of-the-world scenario to begin at any time somewhere in the middle-east.

That final point segues nicely into section two, which I will review as soon as I finish reading it.

**********************
9/13 - Review of Section 2
**********************

I've been neglecting this book for a while, but I've picked it up again. I'm afraid it's not going to be the must-read bestseller I'd hoped for. It's exceedingly thorough and the issues it raises are critically important, but it just isn't accessible enough to be popular. Phillips was a political strategist, and he seems to be targeting future researchers and historians rather than the contemporary public. A denomination-by-denomination breakdown of voting patterns during the Civil War is interesting in the academic sense, but I can't imagine the average reader sitting still for it. This is really a book for NTJs ;). I still recommend that anyone interested give it a try, and skim a little if you need to.

Section 2 tackles the subject of radical religion, and it is this article from today's Washington Post that prompted me to update my review:
Quote:
President Bush said yesterday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as "a confrontation between good and evil".
This is scary stuff and, as we will see, precisely in line with several negative historical precedents.

The first chapter begins with a succinct summary of the problem: "Few questions will be more important to the twenty-first-century United States than whether renascent religion and its accompanying political hubris will be carried on the nation's books as an asset or as a liability". Most everyone understands that there is religion and there is religion. The type that concerns Phillips is what he calls "millennial Christianity", which he identifies by belief in the imminent end of the world through a holy war in which the forces of good enter into a final showdown with the forces of evil.

The thesis of the first chapter is that radicalized Christianity is becoming the norm in America. Phillips quotes a historian who notes that "previously marginal groups have become larger and more important, while previously central denominations have moved toward the margins... The Protestant bodies whose rates of growth in recent decades have exceeded general population increases--sometimes far exceeded--are nearly all characterized by such labels as Bible-believing, born again, conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist, holiness, Pentecostal, or restorationist." Many pages worth of statistics and surveys are trotted out to support this claim. In addition to radical religion, Phillips shows that religiosity in general has been steadily on the rise. In 1776, only 17% of Americans stated some form of religious adherence. In 1850 it was 45%, 56% in 1926, and 63% in 2000, when the Attorney General literally had himself anointed with oil upon taking office.

Many pages are spent tracing the roots of the modern American Millennial movement from pre-Civil War revival preachers to Tim LaHaye and "Left Behind". Phillips argues that religion in America has always had a "revival-prone sectarian and radical side" and that the involvement of radical denominations and preachers in matters of war and politics is nothing new. He shows how important religious fervor was to both sides in the Civil War, and how it simmered in the defeated south afterwards. Quoting a historian: "In the mythology of Lost Cause, the southerners became like the Israelites of the Old Testament. They remained God's people, who would enter the promised land if they kept His commandments and covenants, among which was fealty to their noble cause." This southern, Reconstruction-era flavor of religious fervor eventually boiled over to engulf much of the nation and gave rise to the radical sects of today—the second chapter is entitled “Defeat and Resurrection—The Southernization of America”. Paul Harvey wrote that "in the twentieth century, with the Southern Baptist Convention becoming the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, it became increasingly apparent that white southerners had lost the war but won the peace". Indeed, Phillips spends several pages showing that the old Yankee/Dixie divide is still alive, well, and determining elections, though the new Mason-Dixie line has to be expressed in terms of religious belief rather than geography. In the 90’s, Gallup claimed that “religious affiliation remains one of the most accurate and least-appreciated political indicators available”.

After a rather lengthy review of the United States’ religious history, Phillips turns to what he calls “the first American religious party”. “By the second administration of George W. Bush, the Republican party in the United States was on the road to a new incarnation as an ecumenical religious party, claiming loyalties from hard-shell Baptists and Mormons, as well as the Eastern Rite Catholics and Hasidic Jews. Secular liberalism was becoming the common enemy”. He quotes a political analyst: “Since 1980, religious Americans of all faiths—fundamentalist Protestants, observant Catholics, even Orthodox Jews—have been moving towards the Republican Party. At the same time, secular Americans have found a home in the Democratic Party. This is something new in American politics. We have never had a religious party in this country.” He points out that the United States is the only major Western nation in modern times where religious conservatism has amounted to a significant movement. The “moral values” factor in the 2000 and 2004 elections and the connections between the Bush administration and conservative religious organizations are well-known. The book examines these things in depth, but I don’t think I need to rehash them here.

Next we move on to 9/11 and the resulting war on terror. This section was the one I found most interesting. Phillips describes how the apocalyptic beliefs of “Left Behind”-reading millennial Christians predisposed them to expect a black-and-white, good vs. evil struggle in the Middle East. When Bush, a “Left Behind” reader himself, sought to characterize the fight against terrorism and later Saddam Hussein in precisely those terms, millions of Americans were ready and eager to jump on board. Even before 2001, writers were looking for enemies in “Babylon” (Iraq), and many had already suggested that Saddam Hussein was the antichrist. Phillips describes a different world where the “war on terror” is really a struggle against Satan and the antichrist destined to culminate in the glorious, violent fulfillment of Biblical prophesy, and factual contradictions and practical concerns are minor details. This perhaps explains why so many Americans continue to believe that Hussein was connected to the 9/11 attacks despite mountains of evidence to the contrary—they’ve invested too heavily and too religiously in the idea to just let it go. “The distinctions that mattered to secular Americans—that Saddam was not involved in the September 11 attacks and that the weapons-of-mass-destruction excuse for invading Iraq was specious—would have mattered less to the tens of millions of true believers viewing events through a Left Behind perspective. They simply embraced Bush’s broad good-versus-evil explanation”.

Phillips finds many troubling symptoms of radical, millennial Christianity in the post-9/11 White House. “You’re either with us or you’re against us” and “God is not neutral” (i.e, He is on our side) are obvious examples. He also shows how Bush speeches are often peppered with “code words” and phrases that evoke specific Biblical passages and add an additional layer of meaning for anyone in the know. He discusses Charles Kimball’s five symptoms of destructive fundamentalism and claims the Bush White House exhibits them all: “claiming absolute truth, seizing upon an ‘ideal time’, as in claims for imminent cataclysms or fast-approaching end-times, fostering blind obedience, using ends to justify the means, and pursuing ‘holy war’”.

Finally, in “Church, State, and National Decline”, Phillips returns to history and examines the role religious excess played in the imperial decline of Rome, Hapsburg Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Britain. He claims that all of these empires exhibited most of the following as they passed their zeniths: “widespread public concern over cultural and economic decay, with its many corollaries… growing religious fervor, church-state relationship, or crusading insistence… a rising commitment to faith as opposed to reason and a corollary downplaying of science… a considerable popular anticipation of a millennial time frame: an epochal battle, emergence of the antichrist, or belief in an imminent second coming or Armageddon… [and] a hubris-driven national strategic and military overreach, often pursuing abstract international missions that the nation could no longer afford economically or politically”. He explains in some detail how these factors played out for each of the empires mentioned above.

The comparison I found most interesting, and the one Phillips considers most relevant, is Britain circa World War I. I was largely ignorant of the role the Church of England played in pushing the nation into war and casting the struggle in millennial terms. The bishop of London called the war “a great crusade to kill Germans” and told The Guardian “you ask for my advice in a sentence as to what the church is to do. I answer MOBILIZE THE NATION FOR A HOLY WAR”. Phillips writes that “music-hall jingoism, militant Protestant hymnology, and queen-and-country literature converged… Between 1871 and 1914, English fiction writers turned out sixty books about foreign invasions of Britain... In none of these volumes was Britain the aggressor, but even in Boy Scout and cricket uniforms young British males were preparing for the great match to come”. Just as the “Left Behind” movement predisposed twenty-first century American Christians to accept and expect war in the Middle East, so early twentieth-century sermons, novels, and endless refrains of “Onward Christian Soldiers” left Britons ready and eager to fight in WWI. Perhaps the lesson and warning here is that millennial expectations tend to be self-fulfilling.

It is significant that The Church of England never recovered from the mistake it made in supporting the war and predicting a glorious outcome. By the 40’s, church attendance had gone from being a social obligation to netting only 15% of the population. The British played with fire, got burned, and learned their lesson. The Americans, who emerged in much better shape, did not. Phillips points out that “while the lessons of Rome and Spain are distant and only minimally relevant, that is not true of evangelical, Protestant Britain, marching proudly—and naively—to war under the same hymns still sung at Iowa church suppers. British observers were appalled, in March 2003, to find that George W. Bush had been transporting himself back to the [WWI General] Allenby years through his Oswald Chambers readings”. Chambers was a Scottish war chaplain whose advice was to put aside all considerations other than the glory of God. “For Chambers, the enemy was ‘evil’, religious duty was clear, and Christian soldiers marched onwards in a straight line”. Irony indeed.

Debt is the topic of section 3, and section 2 concludes with the following segue: “As in Britain nearly a century earlier, evangelical religion, biblically stirred foreign policy, and a crusader mentality ill fitted a great power decreasingly able to bear the rising economic cost of strategic and energy supply failure”.

Last edited by Dave_LF on Thu 14 Sep , 2006 6:30 am, edited 10 times in total.

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I'm interested. I might even add it to my already-overextended reading list if you give it the thumbs-up.

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Dave, I saw this book while I was browsing in a bookstore yesterday.

Normally I don't read "political" books, but this one looked different. I'd be interested in your comments for sure. :)

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Review of section 1 added to original post.


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I was mainly interested in this book because of the religious aspect, but this...
Quote:
For a person whose knowledge of oil politics and economics doesn't extend much beyond the current price of gas, I suspect it would be one eye-opener after another.
... describes me to a "T". Sounds very interesting so far. I'm trying to expand my mind. ;)

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Very interesting! Keep up the reviews, since I doubt that I am going to have time to read the book!

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Dave -

Our newly created Waukesha County federated library system has two copies, both checked out, but I have put my name onto the hold list. This book sounds like somthing right up my alley, and I hope that it continues to get more coverage, since the bits that you have cited and that I have read elsewhere only also confirm many of my own beliefs.

I would be most interested to see what Phillips recommends as alternatives and recourses to the current state of affairs. It is all too easy to comment on the past and the present, but the future is where we really need to be worried.

:)

Keep giving us your insights and reviews in the meantime!!

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Dave_LF
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Sunday's Washington Post published an excerpt from the book as a guest editorial:
Quote:
How the GOP Became God's Own Party
...
The United States has organized much of its military posture since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks around the protection of oil fields, pipelines and sea lanes. But U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has another dimension. In addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the White House is courting end-times theologians and electorates for whom the Holy Lands are a battleground of Christian destiny...The political corollary -- fascinating but appalling -- is the recent transformation of the Republican presidential coalition. Since the election of 2000 and especially that of 2004, three pillars have become central: the oil-national security complex, with its pervasive interests; the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and the debt-driven financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street.
...
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 Napoleon would have flinched. What Caesar and Napoleon did not face, but less able American presidents do, is that bungled overseas military embroilments 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.
...
Unfortunately, more danger lurks in the responsiveness of the new GOP coalition to Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists and Pentecostals, who muster some 40 percent of the party electorate. 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 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 financial crisis that could follow a substantial liquidation by foreign holders of U.S. bonds is the stuff of nightmares. To watch U.S. voters 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.
...
Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq -- widely anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon -- the Republican coalition has also seeded half a dozen controversies in the realm of science. 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 and opposition to stem cell research.
...
No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science...Conservative true believers will scoff at such concerns. The United States is a unique and chosen nation, they say; 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 apparently was not added a further debilitating note to the late stages of each national decline.
...
Unfortunately, three of the preeminent weaknesses displayed in these past declines have been religious excess, a declining energy and industrial base, and debt often linked to foreign and military overstretch. Politics in the United States -- and especially the evolution of the governing Republican coalition -- deserves much of the blame for the fatal convergence of these forces in America today.


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How times have changed.

So much for the Treaty Of Tripoli:
Annals of Congress, 5th Congress, Article 11 wrote:
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
(my emphasis)

In a very public way, they voted to say that "As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion, the Muslims of Tripoli therefore need not fear a religious war from the U.S." This was the 339th time that a recorded vote was required in Congress, and only the third time that a vote was recorded when the vote was unanimous.

President Adams signed the treaty and proclaimed it to the nation on 10 June 1797. His statement on it was a bit unusual.
Quote:
Now be it known, That I John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen and considered the said Treaty do, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, accept, ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and article thereof. And to the End that the said Treaty may be observed and performed with good Faith on the part of the United States, I have ordered the premises to be made public; And I do hereby enjoin and require all persons bearing office civil or military within the United States, and all other citizens or inhabitants thereof, faithfully to observe and fulfill the said Treaty and every clause and article thereof.

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Review of section 2 (finally) added to original post.


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