'American Theocracy' author sees country on edge of precipice

Kelly Lemieux, Special to the News

Published April 21, 2006 at midnight

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Author Kevin Phillips, a former mouthpiece for the Republican party, turned more than a few heads in our nation's capital two years ago with the publication of American Dynasty, a scathing indictment of the Bush and Walker families and their century-long investment in America's energy, security and intelligence communities.

His postulate was that the Bush family's lengthy involvement with our nation's political system - first grandfather Prescott Bush, then father George Herbert Walker Bush and finally the son George Walker Bush - had turned our democratic system of leadership into a royal dynastic model based on the British system we dispensed with during our war for independence in the 18th century.

The charge was a potent one, given that Phillips was the author of The Emerging Republican Majority back in 1969, a prescient study of voting trends that predicted the Republican Party's current domination of American politics, a shift in political power he wholly endorsed at the time.

His new book, American Theocracy, takes his American Dynasty thesis one step further, predicting a confrontational crossroads, or meltdown, predicated on our nation's entanglements with fundamentalist Christianity, hydrocarbon energy and a colossal debt that's unmatched in human history.

And history is where the author takes us on his stupendously researched journey through the last 500 years of superpower history. Marshaling economic and political data about the life cycles of Spanish, Dutch and finally British imperial ambitions, he ultimately focuses his unsparing eye on America's emergence from regional industrial power to the current global hegemony that now rivals any civilization in history.

His scope is massive and his analysis is a warning: Phillips sketches a future bankrupted by a nexus of religious, energy and debt concerns that leaves the world's remaining superpower helpless before emerging powers such as China well before 2050.

Unlike a majority of America's distinguished journalists and pundits, Phillips takes as a given that 21st century oil and water resource concerns are the true driver of the War on Terrorism, not a desire for the spread of democracy or an end to tyranny.

"Oil has soaked deeply into the politics and power structure of the United States," the author writes. "More than a fuel, oil became a heritage and also the basis of a lifestyle."

As evidence, he relates the geopolitical maneuvers and military conquests of the Spanish, Dutch and British regimes that preceded our own on the global stage, showing how they were the means to secure commercial transit routes and continued power.

Another of the author's concerns is what he calls the 'Southernization' of the United States, the spread of formerly fringe religious movements such as Pentecostals, Baptists and other fundamentalist sects from the former Confederate South.

Phillips takes a lengthy detour in American Theocracy into Civil War history and posits that the defeated South actually won the culture war over a century later by conquering the minds, if not the territory, of most of the nation through religion.

He theorizes - thoroughly supported by opinion polls and other social barometers - that America's religiosity is a form of nationalism and indicative of societal decay, eclipsing and eroding the accomplishments of science, education and industry, the standard bearers that paved the way for the ascent of American civilization.

Phillips writes, "While sermons and rhetoric propounding American exceptionalism proclaim religiosity an asset, a somber array of historical precedents - the pitfalls of imperial Christian overreach from Rome to Britain - tip the scales toward liability."

He plainly details the other nations before us that saw themselves as "chosen" to promote a manifest destiny and also plainly relates their imperial collapses.

The death of industry is Phillips' last thesis in American Theocracy, as he relates our country's recent transition from an industrial-based economy to a financial economy, one where we don't make things, we just move money around.

The author marshals painful statistics about what he calls the "financialization" of the nation, including the breadth of our national debt, the treasury bonds we sell to competitor nations, the personal credit card debt of individual Americans, the trade deficit that he refers to as the borrowers-industrial complex.

"The armchair detective can easily figure out," Phillips writes, "that we are approaching a national transformation in economic vitality that past world powers allowed to their peril." His analysis of the financial breakdown of the Spanish and Dutch empires eerily echoes our own current financial situation.

The picture Phillips leaves the reader with is a dismal one, but cogently analyzed. He's a researcher at heart, and American Theocracy, like his previous works Wealth and Democracy, The Cousin's War and The Politics of Rich and Poor, compiles a mountain's worth of facts and tabulations, graphs and statistics to bolster each of his arguments.

The writer seems genuinely concerned and dismayed at the direction of American civilization, as our manufacturing sector slowly dies and is replaced by a financial services industry that he predicts will eventually outsource our most strategic resources to not necessarily friendly emerging powers like China and India, who are striving to outpace us in university graduates in science and information technology.

Perhaps the only fault in the book is a lack of analysis of America's predominance in the latter, the driving force of this new post-industrial Age of Information. The new, and old, mantra is that information is power and our nation dominates this sector, even if we do outsource our call centers to India and our manufacturing to China.

But Phillips' warning in American Theocracy is a strong one that should not be lightly ignored by those in power at our nation's capital.

Kelly Lemieux is a freelance writer living in Denver.

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