May 3, 2006
Gil Troy: Review of Kevin Phillips's American Theocracy
[Gil Troy teaches history at McGill University.]
Something about George W. Bush drives opponents bananas. Especially many of America's "best and brightest" are reduced to sputtering madmen -- and women -- when discussing the president. This Bushophobia has produced dozens of hysterical jeremiads convincing to those already convinced Bush is a disaster but alienating to many, more neutral, Americans. Kevin Phillips' sad metamorphosis from visionary political analyst to dyspeptic partisan polemicist demonstrates just how self-defeating this blind hatred can be.
Four decades ago, the 29-year-old Phillips' prescient book "The Emerging Republican Majority" marked a remarkable public debut. Part analysis, part blueprint, the 1969 book charted Republicans' course in wooing the once solidly Democratic South, resulting in the Reagan Revolution. Twenty-one years later, with "The Politics of Rich and Poor," Phillips demonstrated a refreshing political independence and intellectual creativity that working in Washington usually destroys. In this iconoclastic analysis of the 1980s, and other books, Phillips revealed that, neither Republican nor Democrat, he was a populist, lambasting America's growing concentration of wealth.
Alas, George W. Bush, as a subject, has defeated this formidable thinker -- along with many others. Following and partially recycling his withering 2004 family history, "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," Phillips now claims the Bush pathology threatens all of America.
Bush does not dominate Phillips' new book, "American Theocracy." The president is more a nightmarish apparition haunting a work that claims that Bush's persona and policies epitomize and intensify the "three major perils" to the nation's survival: the religious right, ballooning debt and oil addiction.
Phillips roots his contemporary political analysis in an historical analysis of fallen empires. Yet his Bush-inspired hysteria consistently undermines his scholarly erudition.
The opening section "Oil and American Supremacy" discusses "fuel and national power." Phillips argues that America's thirst for oil distorted its foreign policy, making America unduly vulnerable to foreign suppliers, just as the Dutch trading empire of the 1590s to 1720s was, and the British empire of 1760 to 1914 proved to be.
The second section, "Too Many Preachers," simultaneously mourns radicalized evangelicals' rising influence and America's "Southernization." Here, he claims that modern America is plagued by the toxic combination of fear, cultural decay, "growing religious fervor," trusting faith over reason and hubris that led to the collapse of the Dutch, British, Roman, Spanish and Hapsburg empires.
Finally, the section on ""Borrowed Prosperity" warns that America's financial bubble is about to burst -- as others' have.
Unfortunately, Phillips' important warnings are lost amid an attack which is so undisciplined, frantic, excessive and amoral in its false comparisons as to lose credibility. For starters, the title, "American Theocracy," is simply stupid -- a word I have never before used in two decades of reviewing. Suggesting that modern America with its secular democratic political, economic and entertainment systems, its array of constitutionally protected freedoms, is in any way a theocracy reveals a stark ignorance of the term. Using it reinforces Phillips' false, malicious comparisons with the Taliban, the Iranian Khomeineists, Osama Bin Laden and other disreputable Islamicist jihadists, foolishly blurring together "Islamic, Christian, and Jewish fundamentalism."
When assessing the role of religion, particularly the evangelicals, Phillips simply gets unhinged. Linking "radical religion" with "oil and borrowed money" in his apocalyptic trinity makes his argument more readable and sellable. Most Americans prefer screaming about Pat Robertson's latest outrage or Terry Schiavo's right to die than thinking about oil depletion allowances and the prime rate.
But Phillips' analytical barometer seems broken as he jumps to more extreme -- and damning -- conclusions than his evidence, or realities, allow. True, historians have underestimated the role of religion in America, but that does not mean that either the American Revolution or the Civil War was "in many ways a religious war." True, Southerners enjoy growing national influence today, but to imply that somehow the South ultimately won the Civil War is the kind of characteristic rhetorical overkill that substitutes hysterical punch lines for historical truths.
And true, evangelicals exercise growing influence in the Republican party, but that does not prove that "a national Disenlightenment" has occurred or make America "the world's leading Bible-reading crusader state, immersed in an Old Testament of stern prophets and bloody Middle Eastern battlefields." Moreover, describing post 9/11 American policy as "seizing the fundamentalist moment" is crudely reductionist, disrespecting the thousands of innocent victims murdered that day in an unprovoked attack by the only lethal fundamentalists posing a major threat to the world today.
For good measure, and to feed his false, amoral comparison between Western entities such as the United States with its Islamicist enemies, Phillips occasionally clumps America with another evangelical favorite and, thus to Phillips, another foe, Israel. "The excesses of fundamentalism, in turn, are American and Israeli, as well as the all-too-obvious depredations of radical Islam," Phillips claims in his preface. Revealingly, amid hundreds of footnotes, the only citation even referring to Israel mentions an Israeli newspaper article about American Jewish voting. Nowhere does Phillips document his allegations against Israel or show upon what they are based, beyond echoing many intellectuals' prejudice against the Jewish state. This impression is reinforced by the claim that "Orthodox Jewish females cannot even study the Torah," an absurd assertion so incorrect and nasty as to impeach the author's integrity along with his credibility.
The sections on "Western fuelishness" and America's financial house of cards are more convincing. It is inexcusable that we remain mired in the same debates from the 1970s' oil crisis and that our scientific wizards have not invented synthetic alternatives to foreign oil. And it is unnerving that America has shifted from a nation that produced products on a grand scale, exported real goods worldwide and tried to balance a budget to a country filled with financial acrobats who juggle numbers all day, feed a growing trade deficit and ignore a national debt that seems destined to doom our spoiled lifestyles. Still, even in these more data-driven sections, Phillips overstates.
Alleging Richard Nixon was in the oil companies' grip because "Nixon had an oil-state childhood himself" makes as much sense as labeling all New Yorkers Wall Street brigands or all North Carolinians tobacco-addicted smokers. Phillips is too much the deterministic Chicken Little historian, convinced the sky is falling because other empires collapsed. It is one thing to point out that "Natural resources, religious excess, wars and burgeoning debt levels have been prominent causes of the downfall of the previous leading world economic powers." But history is not a crystal ball. Remembering how different empires fell will not guarantee America's demise.
America needs some wake up calls. We need an intelligent, critical conversation about how we devour resources, where our economy is heading, how much longer we can sustain gargantuan trade and budget deficits -- even when the supposedly fiscally responsible party rules. We also need an intelligent, critical conversation about religion's role in politics, America's broader values crisis and how politics have turned so ugly. As President Bush's administration winds down, perhaps the grip of Bushophobia will loosen and analysts like Kevin Phillips will be able to produce the prescient, incisive and balanced commentaries they once did. Until then, alas, the long awaited national consciousness-raising will be delayed by the ever more vicious partisan shouting matches.
Something about George W. Bush drives opponents bananas. Especially many of America's "best and brightest" are reduced to sputtering madmen -- and women -- when discussing the president. This Bushophobia has produced dozens of hysterical jeremiads convincing to those already convinced Bush is a disaster but alienating to many, more neutral, Americans. Kevin Phillips' sad metamorphosis from visionary political analyst to dyspeptic partisan polemicist demonstrates just how self-defeating this blind hatred can be.
Four decades ago, the 29-year-old Phillips' prescient book "The Emerging Republican Majority" marked a remarkable public debut. Part analysis, part blueprint, the 1969 book charted Republicans' course in wooing the once solidly Democratic South, resulting in the Reagan Revolution. Twenty-one years later, with "The Politics of Rich and Poor," Phillips demonstrated a refreshing political independence and intellectual creativity that working in Washington usually destroys. In this iconoclastic analysis of the 1980s, and other books, Phillips revealed that, neither Republican nor Democrat, he was a populist, lambasting America's growing concentration of wealth.
Alas, George W. Bush, as a subject, has defeated this formidable thinker -- along with many others. Following and partially recycling his withering 2004 family history, "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," Phillips now claims the Bush pathology threatens all of America.
Bush does not dominate Phillips' new book, "American Theocracy." The president is more a nightmarish apparition haunting a work that claims that Bush's persona and policies epitomize and intensify the "three major perils" to the nation's survival: the religious right, ballooning debt and oil addiction.
Phillips roots his contemporary political analysis in an historical analysis of fallen empires. Yet his Bush-inspired hysteria consistently undermines his scholarly erudition.
The opening section "Oil and American Supremacy" discusses "fuel and national power." Phillips argues that America's thirst for oil distorted its foreign policy, making America unduly vulnerable to foreign suppliers, just as the Dutch trading empire of the 1590s to 1720s was, and the British empire of 1760 to 1914 proved to be.
The second section, "Too Many Preachers," simultaneously mourns radicalized evangelicals' rising influence and America's "Southernization." Here, he claims that modern America is plagued by the toxic combination of fear, cultural decay, "growing religious fervor," trusting faith over reason and hubris that led to the collapse of the Dutch, British, Roman, Spanish and Hapsburg empires.
Finally, the section on ""Borrowed Prosperity" warns that America's financial bubble is about to burst -- as others' have.
Unfortunately, Phillips' important warnings are lost amid an attack which is so undisciplined, frantic, excessive and amoral in its false comparisons as to lose credibility. For starters, the title, "American Theocracy," is simply stupid -- a word I have never before used in two decades of reviewing. Suggesting that modern America with its secular democratic political, economic and entertainment systems, its array of constitutionally protected freedoms, is in any way a theocracy reveals a stark ignorance of the term. Using it reinforces Phillips' false, malicious comparisons with the Taliban, the Iranian Khomeineists, Osama Bin Laden and other disreputable Islamicist jihadists, foolishly blurring together "Islamic, Christian, and Jewish fundamentalism."
When assessing the role of religion, particularly the evangelicals, Phillips simply gets unhinged. Linking "radical religion" with "oil and borrowed money" in his apocalyptic trinity makes his argument more readable and sellable. Most Americans prefer screaming about Pat Robertson's latest outrage or Terry Schiavo's right to die than thinking about oil depletion allowances and the prime rate.
But Phillips' analytical barometer seems broken as he jumps to more extreme -- and damning -- conclusions than his evidence, or realities, allow. True, historians have underestimated the role of religion in America, but that does not mean that either the American Revolution or the Civil War was "in many ways a religious war." True, Southerners enjoy growing national influence today, but to imply that somehow the South ultimately won the Civil War is the kind of characteristic rhetorical overkill that substitutes hysterical punch lines for historical truths.
And true, evangelicals exercise growing influence in the Republican party, but that does not prove that "a national Disenlightenment" has occurred or make America "the world's leading Bible-reading crusader state, immersed in an Old Testament of stern prophets and bloody Middle Eastern battlefields." Moreover, describing post 9/11 American policy as "seizing the fundamentalist moment" is crudely reductionist, disrespecting the thousands of innocent victims murdered that day in an unprovoked attack by the only lethal fundamentalists posing a major threat to the world today.
For good measure, and to feed his false, amoral comparison between Western entities such as the United States with its Islamicist enemies, Phillips occasionally clumps America with another evangelical favorite and, thus to Phillips, another foe, Israel. "The excesses of fundamentalism, in turn, are American and Israeli, as well as the all-too-obvious depredations of radical Islam," Phillips claims in his preface. Revealingly, amid hundreds of footnotes, the only citation even referring to Israel mentions an Israeli newspaper article about American Jewish voting. Nowhere does Phillips document his allegations against Israel or show upon what they are based, beyond echoing many intellectuals' prejudice against the Jewish state. This impression is reinforced by the claim that "Orthodox Jewish females cannot even study the Torah," an absurd assertion so incorrect and nasty as to impeach the author's integrity along with his credibility.
The sections on "Western fuelishness" and America's financial house of cards are more convincing. It is inexcusable that we remain mired in the same debates from the 1970s' oil crisis and that our scientific wizards have not invented synthetic alternatives to foreign oil. And it is unnerving that America has shifted from a nation that produced products on a grand scale, exported real goods worldwide and tried to balance a budget to a country filled with financial acrobats who juggle numbers all day, feed a growing trade deficit and ignore a national debt that seems destined to doom our spoiled lifestyles. Still, even in these more data-driven sections, Phillips overstates.
Alleging Richard Nixon was in the oil companies' grip because "Nixon had an oil-state childhood himself" makes as much sense as labeling all New Yorkers Wall Street brigands or all North Carolinians tobacco-addicted smokers. Phillips is too much the deterministic Chicken Little historian, convinced the sky is falling because other empires collapsed. It is one thing to point out that "Natural resources, religious excess, wars and burgeoning debt levels have been prominent causes of the downfall of the previous leading world economic powers." But history is not a crystal ball. Remembering how different empires fell will not guarantee America's demise.
America needs some wake up calls. We need an intelligent, critical conversation about how we devour resources, where our economy is heading, how much longer we can sustain gargantuan trade and budget deficits -- even when the supposedly fiscally responsible party rules. We also need an intelligent, critical conversation about religion's role in politics, America's broader values crisis and how politics have turned so ugly. As President Bush's administration winds down, perhaps the grip of Bushophobia will loosen and analysts like Kevin Phillips will be able to produce the prescient, incisive and balanced commentaries they once did. Until then, alas, the long awaited national consciousness-raising will be delayed by the ever more vicious partisan shouting matches.