[lit-ideas] voices in the wilderness
- From: Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 13:26:53 EST
Hi,
Speaking of fundamentalist theology and it's impact on political structures,
social structures, etc--Has anyone read this book, yet? I found his second
point about the radical Christianity take-over rather interesting as in what I
read (outside of Missouri's world where the war rages on) speaks more of the
Islamic world's fundamentalist theological impact and little of what is
still continuing in the USA. (Did we talk about that town in Florida which is
setting itself up as a theocracy? Gov Bush is not sure what to do, I think...)
Missouri, in November, will hopefully come out on the other side--we've had
a couple of years of knowing what can happen with the fundamentalist
Christianity in office. (Our governor, son of Rep Blunt who almost took DeLay's
place
and who has two siblings who are major lobbyists, has done a complete
about-face and no longer is considered by the 'pro-life' Missouri group to be
'pro-life'...Stowers Institute, Wash Univ, and former Sen & UN Ambassador
Danforth
can be thanked for that...though it has not helped money for living kids or
those in foster care much...) On the ballot in November will be a measure
dealing with stem-cell research in Missouri. My local senator is one of the
most major rising stars in the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican party
today--but there is another rising star who is a moderate who will be vying
for the Republican nomination. A rising Democratic star has shifted his
attention this way and will be running against him, too. This is going to be a
very
interesting race--but my local senator won because of the phone calls from
one of the huge local Southern Baptists mega-churches [yes, illegal--but I
doubt most of the people making the calls knew it...I got calls from friends
who
thought I'd like to make calls with them...)
The moderate Christian and other religious voices in Missouri is finally
waking up and beginning to speak--and to do what they needed to do all along
(kind of like LH keeps saying the moderate Islamic voice needs to do...)
I think most people are pretty much wanting to just live their lives--and
sometimes until it is (almost) too late don't see the implications of living
one
day at a time. (I recently read another article in the NY Times about how
little the global corporate world, esp based in the US, has planned for any
emergency epidemic or catastrophe, even as Avian flu for example, moves
outward...again--we live day-to-day and then will go 'oops'. It IS
interesting to
wonder how the US would react if all of a sudden things halted because so
many people were sick, afraid to go to work [still so few that allow or have
made contingencies for working from home to get things done], etc. We just
don't
like to plan -- perhaps because the guys in charge cannot see an immediate
payback so it cuts into the bottom line and the ones in the middle or lower
have no authority to do anything...)
Here is the review's last sentence:
"What makes this book powerful in spite of the familiarity of many of its
arguments is his rare gift for looking broadly and structurally at social and
political change. By describing a series of major transformations, by
demonstrating the relationships among them and by discussing them with
passionate
restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing picture of national danger that no
American reader will welcome, but that none should ignore. "
NEW YORK TIMES
March 19, 2006
'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips
Clear and Present Dangers
Review by ALAN BRINKLEY
Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the
Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In writing "The
Emerging Republican Majority" (published in 1969), he asked a very big question
about American politics: How would the demographic and economic changes of
postwar America shape the long-term future of the two major parties? His
answer,
startling at the time but now largely unquestioned, is that the movement of
people and resources from the old Northern industrial states into the South
and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the "Sun Belt") would produce a
new and more conservative Republican majority that would dominate American
politics for decades. Phillips viewed the changes he predicted with optimism.
A
stronger Republican Party, he believed, would restore stability and order to a
society experiencing disorienting and at times violent change. Shortly
before publishing his book, he joined the Nixon administration to help advance
the
changes he had foreseen.
Phillips has remained a prolific and important political commentator in the
decades since, but he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican
coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th) looks broadly and
historically at the political world the conservative coalition has
painstakingly
constructed over the last several decades. No longer does he see Republican
government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a
nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal
irresponsibility,
rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness. (His final chapter is entitled
"The Erring Republican Majority.") In an era of best-selling jeremiads on both
sides of the political divide, "American Theocracy" may be the most alarming
analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have appeared in many
years. It is not without polemic, but unlike many of the more glib and
strident political commentaries of recent years, it is extensively researched
and
for the most part frighteningly persuasive.
Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the dangerous
policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much time examining the
ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. Instead, he identifies
three broad and related trends â none of them new to the Bush years but all
of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies â that
together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the
role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign
and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical
Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing
levels of
debt â current and prospective â that both the government and the American
people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit,
theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the
failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate
ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.
The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on
the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National
Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great
archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more
meaningful, was
the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held
the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production. Phillips
fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration
dismisses as conspiracy theory â that its principal purpose was to secure
vast oil
reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to
lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve
underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for
better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy
and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the
real motivation for the invasion.
And while this argument may be somewhat too simplistic to explain the
complicated mix of motives behind the war, it is hard to dismiss Phillips's
larger
argument: that the pursuit of oil has for at least 30 years been one of the
defining elements of American policy in the world; and that the Bush
administration â unusually dominated by oilmen â has taken what the
president
deplored recently as the nation's addiction to oil to new and terrifying
levels. The
United States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips writes,
"the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a global
oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes
freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill
and
ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."
Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force
that he sees shaping contemporary American life â radical Christianity and
its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of
evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the
2004
election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from
scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling
picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.
He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned
seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it
dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The
Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of
its
voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On
the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of
"Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "_Taliban_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/taliban/index.html?inline=ny
t-org) -like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of
church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government
shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as
many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical
prophecies of an imminent "rapture" â the return of Jesus to the world and
the
elevation of believers to heaven.
Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and
the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as
predictors of the apocalypse â among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish
settlement
of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly
demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to
such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a
response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and
other
members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves,
that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it
to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant,
but not conclusive.
THE third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also, perhaps,
the best known â the astonishing rise of debt as the precarious underpinning
of the American economy. He is not, of course, the only observer who has noted
the dangers of indebtedness. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for
example, frequently writes about the looming catastrophe. So do many
more-conservative economists, who point especially to future debt â
particularly the
enormous obligation, which Phillips estimates at between $30 trillion and $40
trillion, that Social Security and health care demands will create in the
coming decades. The most familiar debt is that of the United States
government,
fueled by soaring federal budget deficits that have continued (with a brief
pause in the late 1990's) for more than two decades. But the national debt â
currently over $8 trillion â is only the tip of the iceberg. There has also
been an explosion of corporate debt, state and local bonded debt,
international debt through huge trade imbalances, and consumer debt (mostly in
the form
of credit-card balances and aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages).
Taken together, this present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.
The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although
exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the work of
many
people over many decades â among them _Alan Greenspan_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/alan_greenspan/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
,
who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt to
avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most of all a
product of the "financialization" of the American economy â the turn away
from manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving and managing money, a
trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by the preoccupation with oil
and (somewhat less persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent
rapture, which makes planning for the future unnecessary.
There is little in "American Theocracy" that is wholly original to Phillips,
as he frankly admits by his frequent reference to the work of other writers
and scholars. What makes this book powerful in spite of the familiarity of
many of its arguments is his rare gift for looking broadly and structurally at
social and political change. By describing a series of major transformations,
by demonstrating the relationships among them and by discussing them with
passionate restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing picture of national
danger that no American reader will welcome, but that none should ignore.
Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost at
Columbia University
...
Other related posts:
