[amc] Men's Fellowship - Review II, Sunday evening
- From: wseverin1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Werner J. Severin)
- To: amc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2006 10:13:28 -0500
March 17, 2006
Books of The Times | 'American Theocracy'
Tying Religion and Politics to an Impending U.S. Decline
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Kevin Phillips, a former Republican strategist who helped design that
party's Southern strategy, made his name with his 1969 book, "The Emerging
Republican Majority," which predicted the coming ascendancy of the G.O.P.
In the decades since, Mr. Phillips has become a populist social critic, and
his last two major books - "Wealth and Democracy" (2002) and "American
Dynasty" (2004) - were furious jeremiads against the financial excesses of
the 1990's and what he portrayed as the Bush family's "blatant business
cronyism," with ties to big oil, big corporations and the
military-industrial complex.
His latest book, "American Theocracy," the concluding volume of this
"trilogy of indictments," ranges far beyond the subject suggested by its
title - an examination of the religious right and its influence on the
current administration - to anatomize a host of economic, political,
military and social developments that Mr. Phillips sees as troubling
indices of the United States' coming decline. The book not only reiterates
observations made in "Wealth and Democracy" and "American Dynasty," but
also reworks some of the arguments made by the historian Paul Kennedy in
"The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," dealing with the role that
economic factors play in the fortunes of great powers and the dangers
empires face in becoming financially and militarily overextended.
All in all, "American Theocracy" is a more reasoned (and therefore more
sobering) book than "American Dynasty," substituting copious illustrations
and detailed if sometimes partisan analysis for angry, conspiratorial
rants. But if Mr. Phillips does an artful job of pulling together a lot of
electoral data and historical insights to buttress his polemical points, he
also demonstrates a tendency to extrapolate - sometimes profligately - from
the specific to the general, from the particular to the collective,
especially when making his prognostications of impending decline.
As he's done in so many of his earlier books, Mr. Phillips draws a lot of
detailed analogies in these pages, using demographics, economic statistics
and broader cultural trends to map macropatterns throughout history. In
analyzing the fates of Rome, Hapsburg Spain, the Dutch Republic, Britain
and the United States, he comes up with five symptoms of "a power already
at its peak and starting to decline": 1) "widespread public concern over
cultural and economic decay," along with social polarization and a widening
gap between rich and poor; 2) "growing religious fervor" manifested in a
close state-church relationship and escalating missionary zeal; 3) "a
rising commitment to faith as opposed to reason and a corollary downplaying
of science"; 4) "considerable popular anticipation of a millennial time
frame" and 5) "hubris-driven national strategic and military overreach" in
pursuit of "abstract international missions that the nation can no longer
afford, economically or politically." Added to these symptoms, he writes,
is a sixth one, almost too obvious to state: high debt, which can become
"crippling in its own right."
Mr. Phillips methodically proceeds to show how each of these symptoms
applied to great powers like the Dutch Republic and the British empire in
the past, and how they apply to the United States today.
He reviews how deregulation, the implosion of American manufacturing, the
rising cost of oil imports and substantial tax cuts have contributed to
skyrocketing debt levels and trade deficits, and how the country's net
international indebtedness has soared, he estimates, into the $4 trillion
range.
He argues - not altogether persuasively - that the Bush administration was
pushed toward war with Iraq by pressure from Republican constituencies:
energy producers worried about dwindling oil supplies; financiers worried
that OPEC could end the dollar's virtual monopoly on oil pricing; and
fundamentalist Christians, convinced that recent developments in the Middle
East were signposts on the road to Armageddon and the end-time.
Mr. Phillips adds that "the 30 to 40 percent of the electorate caught up in
Scripture" has exerted a strong pull on the current White House and the
Republican party, driving the country toward what he calls "a national
Disenlightenment" in which science - "notably biotechnology, climate
studies and straight-talking petroleum geology," which warns of dwindling
oil reserves and the need to find oil substitutes - is questioned, even
defied.
As Mr. Phillips sees it, "the Southernization of American governance and
religion" is "abetting far-reaching ideological change and eroding the
separation of powers between church and state," while moving the Republican
party toward "a new incarnation as an ecumenical religious party, claiming
loyalties from hard-shell Baptists and Mormons, as well as Eastern Rite
Catholics and Hasidic Jews," who all define themselves against the common
enemy of secular liberalism.
The interpenetration of religion and politics, Mr. Phillips argues, not
only poses a threat to democratic principles, but may also affect the
course of history, as various precedents suggest: "Militant Catholicism
helped undo the Roman and Spanish empires; the Calvinist fundamentalism of
the Dutch Reformed Church helped to block any 18th-century Dutch renewal;
and the interplay of imperialism and evangelicalism led pre-1914 Britain
into a bloodbath and global decline."
In the case of America today, Mr. Phillips blames the Republican party and
its base for spurring many of the troubling developments - namely, "U.S.
oil vulnerability, excessive indebtedness and indulgence of radical
religion" - that he says are threatening the country's future.
"The Republican electoral coalition," he declares, "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 1850's; the
stock-market-dazzled and Elmer Gantry-ish G.O.P. of the 1920's; and the
imperial liberals of the 1960's with their Great Society social
engineering, quagmire in Vietnam and New Economy skills expected to tame
the business cycle."
Unfortunately for the reader, Mr. Phillips does not use his familiarity
with G.O.P. politics to examine more fully the future of the Republican
party. While he writes that "theological correctness stands to be a
Republican Achilles' heel," he does little to flesh out this notion; nor
does he do much to illuminate the factional splits within the party that
have grown during the presidency of George W. Bush: from fiscal
conservatives furious about this administration's deficit spending to
pragmatic party regulars worried about the president's tumbling poll
numbers to growing numbers of conservatives upset about the
administration's decision to go to war with Iraq and its pursuit of
Wilsonian foreign policy ideals.
In an afterword, Mr. Phillips suggests that the G.O.P. coalition is
"fatally flawed from a national-interest standpoint" partly because it is
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," but he does not really explain why this
development could lead to a Republican downfall. Perhaps he is saving that
for his next book - when the results of the midterm elections are known.
Werner J. Severin
3108 Silverleaf Drive
Austin, Tx. 78757-1611
(512) 452-5080
-------
Austin Mennonite Church, (512) 926-3121 www.mennochurch.org
To unsubscribe: use subject "unsubscribe" sent to amc-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Other related posts:
- » [amc] Men's Fellowship - Review II, Sunday evening
