review

Also in this section:
Books, American Theocracy
Video, Innocents Betrayed
Cool Internet sites

A conservative's book that people who have political disagreements with him ought to read

American Theocracy

a book review by Eric Jackson

American Theocracy

by Kevin Phillips

Viking (New York 2006)

462 p, $26.95 in hardcover

Kevin Phillips is a conservative, a Republican who four decades ago wrote The Emerging Republican Majority and served in the Nixon administration. These days, however, the word "conservative" is one whose meaning is disputed and surely there will be plenty of Republicans with comic book ideologies right out of the Chick pamphlets who would consider Phillips a heretic, a traitor, anything but a conservative.

But if you take the word at one of its dictionary definitions, "moderate, cautious," then American Theocracy is a quintessentially conservative book. It's a warning about some immoderate trends in US political and economic life and the dangers they hold for the future of the republic he holds so dear.

Although the book's title is about religion and politics, really this work is a braid of three strands, one of which is the interface of fundamentalist religion and government. The other two are about the politics of two economic powerhouses, the oil and finance industries. Written before the recent US congressional elections, it concentrates on the confluence of these three strands in the Bush administration and the just defeated GOP power structure on Capitol Hill, but it takes a longer and not particularly friendly to the Democrats view of a set of problems that has not gone away just because of an off-year election that turned on a failed war in Iraq and the Abramoff and Foley scandals that embarrassed the religious right. Thus this book is not dated by the power shift in Congress. It's not yesterday's news, but rather an important book for those wishing to understand long-term social and political trends in the USA and for those who are concerned about the economic predicaments of America's de-industrialization and ballooning debt.

Toward the end of American Theocracy, Phillips sums up the predicament for Republicans like this:

            The Republican electoral coalition, near and dear to me four decades ago, when I began writing The Emerging Republican Majority, has become more and more like the exhausted, erring majorities of earlier failures: the militant, southernized Democrats of the 1850s; the stock market-dazzled Elmer Gantry-ish GOP of the 1920s; and the imperial liberals of the 1960s, with their Great Society social engineering, quagmire in Vietnam, and New Economy skills expected to tame the business cycle. Now the Republicans are again the miscreants.

But that's tame compared to the predicament he sees for the republic. In this book Phillips reviews the history of the previous three dominant world economic powers --- Spain, the Netherlands and Britain --- and sees many of the same pathologies at work in the contemporary United States. Waning technological leads based on obsolete or disappearing energy sources, the decline of production and shift of wealth to financial manipulations, ruinous wars and a religious faiths that impede necessary changes of course are nothing new in this world, he argues, pointing to the confluences of these phenomena in the humbling of economic hegemons past.

Forget those paranoiac delusions about the Chinese People's Liberation Army sneaking into the ports of Cristobal and Balboa and taking over the Panama Canal. If the Beijing gerontocracy really wants to flex its muscles against the Americans, all it has to do is order the central bank to stop buying US dollars.

And is the plunge of Iraq into the abyss of religious civil war the hallmark of American defeat in that war? Surely it is, but Phillips argues that the principal aims of the US invasion were the securing of Iraq's relatively unexploited oil fields for US companies, an opening of petroleum spigots that would drive down world prices, the defeat of OPEC and the reinforcement of the US dollar by shoring up the practice of requiring that its purchase be made with American currency. By all of those measures, he points out, the Iraq War has been a huge disaster for the United States and its allies.

And to what effect, and to whose benefit? Phillips looks east:

One can only imagine the private conversations --- the blunt economic language --- in the conference rooms of Asian financiers and exporters, each group as confident of its contingent's coming hour as executives in Manhattan and Chicago circa 1919 were of America's: "Why don't the Americans take care of their industry and invest in it? Why do they dither over primitive and antiscientific religion? Why are their children so far behind our own students? Why can't they cut back on their foolish and unaffordable consumption of oil? How far can we --- and should we --- support them?

This reviewer's partisan affiliations and social and economic philosophies are not the same as Kevin Phillips's. American Theocracy outlines a set of problems rather than advocates a package of solutions, and while the diagnosis therein is compelling and ought to be instructive to Democrats and Republicans alike, the common ground to be had is far more likely to be found on that issue than on the prescription for a cure --- if there can be the latter.

If you are an American, put on your thinking cap and pick up this book, because your country is calling you to face a serious threat.

And from the Panamanian perspective, don't think that just because there is a political mandate of sorts to upgrade our principal industrial asset that the American predicament does not affect us. First of all, our economy uses the US dollar. Also, seen in light of this book, the "yes" campaign's projections of growth in US imports from China passing through the Panama Canal look ever more dubious. Most of all, what Phillips has to say ought to lead Panamanians to seriously reconsider whether and on what terms we should integrate our economy with that of the United States through a free trade agreement.

Books, American Theocracy
Video, Innocents Betrayed
Cool Internet sites