American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury

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This is the kind of book that would have kept me up at night had I read it six or seven years ago. American Theocracy convincingly and chillingly compares the current situation in the U.S. to that during the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire, The British Empire, Hapsburg Spain, and the Dutch Republic. Scared yet?

Author Kevin Phillips comes up with a series of characteristics of what he called a "power already at its peak and starting to decline." The list includes a polarization of the society and widespread concern with cultural and economic decay; growing religious fervor and an increasingly close relationship between church and state; a rising commitment to faith over reason; growing government debt; and "hubris-driven national strategic and military overreach."

Jeez, open most days' newspaper and don't be surprised to find concrete examples of each of these points.

The point risks being lost amid all the white noise predicting doom and gloom of different sorts these days. No doubt most readers will find themselves a little more jaded to these sorts of prognostications than they would have been just a few years back.

But what separates Mr. Phillips from the pack (at least to some extent) is his curriculum vitae: he is the same Kevin Phillips who, as a Republican strategist in the 1960s, shattered the Democrat's "solid south" in his book The Emerging Republican Majority. Most political scientists credit the book with sowing the seeds that handed the Republicans the White House in every election since then that didn't feature a highly-intelligent southern governor on top of the Democratic ticket as a way to wrestle a few electoral votes away south of the Mason-Dixon line.

If Mr. Phillips can recognize the hubris in what he helped create, then maybe that's something we should take seriously.

The book comes a bit unraveled at the end, though, when Mr. Phillips unconvincingly argues that the disastrous war in Iraq was precipitated by the needs of several key Republican constituencies: energy producers looking for new oil and gas fields to develop, currency traders worried that OPEC might abandon the dollar and cause its collapse, and evangelical Christians who see events of the last generation in the Middle East as coming right from the Book of Revelation, hailing Armageddon. While he there some validity in his conclusions, Mr. Phillips is no doubt oversimplifying an astonishingly complex set of issues.

But his ultimate conclusion -- that Republican extremists currently pulling the strings of power in Washington are responsible for the country's energy vulnerability, over-stretched military, sky-high debt levels, and the indulgence of radical religion -- are a threat to the country as great as the one facing fifth-century Rome is rings true and is without a doubt bone chilling. Come to think of it, American Theocracy may yet keep me awake with worry tonight.

Kevin Phillips is a Republican who puts voice to what concerns many American citizens, (both Republican and Democrat, secular and Christian): 1) that our nation is being taken over by extreme radical right-wing Christian clerics, 2) that our budget deficit is becoming more and more dangerous and 3) that our dependence on a dwindling oil supply will eventually permanently cripple us.

This is a gripping piece of non-fiction that presents a balanced and well-researched view of a growing problem many people seem to prefer to ignore rather than address head-on, as Mr. Phillips courageously does in this book.

I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who feels that our country is becoming more and more unrecognizable to what it was even 6-8 years ago.

In my opinion Kevin Phillips understands the real problems facing America better than any other Republican in America. He is also the kind of Republican who has increasingly been marginalized in the take over of the party by the far left. By no stretch of the imagination is he a liberal (though unquestionably a host of Republicans who haven't read the book will write a review here proclaiming him a liberal), but more of a classic, pre-Reagan conservative in the Russell Kirk, Peter Viereck mode. Despite being a leftist myself, I have long found Phillips to be one of the most acute analysts of the genuine-as opposed to trumped up-problems afflicting American life. In WEALTH AND DEMOCRACY he wrote eloquently of the problems of the undue influence of the wealthy in our democracy as well as the extraordinary and dramatic growth of economic inequality over the past two and a half decades.

AMERICAN THEOCRACY may be Phillips's most important book yet. I was ecstatic when I found a copy this past weekend at a bookstore that broke the moratorium and put their copies out a few days early (bookstores-especially the big chains-often get copies of books to be released on a Tuesday late the previous week, and occasionally they will inadvertently put copies out) and spent the weekend reading it. Phillips explicitly states that his goal is to deal with three of the most pressing problems in American life today, problems that surpass terrorism as a real threat. These three problems are referred to in the subtitle and are dealt with in serial order, though because the problems are intertwined the discussions spill over into one another. The first problem is our dependence on oil and the degree to which it has shaped and determined our national priorities and policies. Phillips thinks historically and understands that nothing takes place without a rich historical context. While many talking about oil and its place in contemporary society begin with the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in the 19th century, Phillips goes much further back, discussing the way that the discovery and mastery of new forms of energy has parallels in previous economically dominant nations. In particular, he writes of the ways that the mastering of water and wind by the Dutch led to their economic ascendance in 17th century Europe and exploiting coal led to the creation of the British Empire. But he also writes of how both nations eventually lost their international preeminence, a change that could very well have begun for the US right now, which became predominant in the previous century due to its exploitation of oil. Phillips writes at length of the development of America's involvement in oil both domestically and abroad. He writes eloquently of how our preoccupation with oil, despite the protests of virtually everyone in the Bush administration to the contrary, was one of the primary causes for our adventurism in Iraq, which has not only has some of the richest oil reserves in the world but has large reserves that have not yet begun to peak, which means that it is cheaper petroleum to harvest.

Because the world's largest oil reserves are in the Middle East, and because premillenial fundamentalists harbor a host of beliefs about the fate of the world and the role that New Babylon (i.e., Iraq) and Israel will play in the end times drama, this part of the book often branches over into the many connections the area has with the aspirations and hopes of many in the Religious Right. But I was ecstatic in reading the book to see Phillips deal not only with the premillenial crowd, which is for the most part the only part of the Religious Right that most mainstream Americans are familiar, but with Christian Reconstructionists or Domionists. Christian Reconstructionists are generally not premillenialists, i.e., they do not believe in the kind of scenario mapped out by Hal Lindsey in his THE LATE-GREAT PLANET EARTH (repeatedly updated due to repeated failures of any of the events he prophesies to take place), where Jesus will return, remove all the Christians from earth, leaving nonbelievers to struggle with a host of trials and tribulations. Christian Reconstructionists believe it is the duty of Christians to strive for the founding of the Kingdom of God on earth. Although even many fundamentalists have never heard of these guys, they have exerted far more influence than many would suspect. Because they have been so far under the radar (mainly because they know that even many within the Religious Right would find their beliefs repulsive), their influence, which is considerable, has gone largely undetected. There are both extreme and somewhat more moderate Reconstructionists. The more extreme, for instance, don't merely believe that homosexuals, for instance, should be killed, but debate what the Biblically approved method of execution should be (stoning or burning are two widely approved methods). Reconstructionists hope gradually to establish a Christian Theocracy, where the Bible (and for some reason these guys are especially oriented towards Old Testament law) establishes the basis for society. The more extreme wings of this movement envision a society in which women are not allowed to work but stay home with their children (don't want children? well, too bad), gays and even heretics (i.e., nonbelievers) are candidates for stoning or burning, and we live in a nation as fundamentalist as any imagined by even the most passionate ayatollah. Milder forms of Reconstructionism sees America as being founded as a Christian nation (all on the Religious Right seem to have a completely bizarre view of the founding fathers, especially Madison) in which Christian law should dominate. Presidential candidate Sam Brownback is of this ilk.

Christian Reconstructionism is, of course, utterly unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans and it is impossible to imagine it ever gaining any of its most cherished goals. But I've been concerned that they have influenced so much American policy behind the scenes. All that needs to be done to overwhelm their efforts is to expose them to the light of day. Phillips goes a long ways towards doing this. I have read extensively about the Religious Right and politics (I was raised a fundamentalist and am a licensed Baptist minister, though I did not go into the ministry after attending seminary and divinity school) and found Phillips discussions to be well informed and balanced. I think he does a fine job of showing that the Religious Right is not a monolithic movement but a coalition of movements, many with their own agendas and concerns. He does not believe that America is in fact in danger of becoming a theocracy, but he does feel that religious influence has become extreme and unacceptable. I have to add that I do think the title of the book is a bit misleading, since he doesn't think America either is or can become a theocracy. The subtitle is a far better pointer to the book's content.

The third problem he addresses is that of our culture of debt. This does not refer merely to the deficit, but the degree to which debt penetrates virtually every aspect of our society in general and government in particular. Phillips's shows in detail the host of ways that this indebtedness threatens the national security and could endanger the most crucial social programs that the aging segment of society depends upon.

I think that between this book and his previous WEALTH AND DEMOCRACY Phillips has dealt very successfully with four of the five major problems in America today, though I think Phillips curiously fails to note the fifth. The four problems he deals with are the three in this book-the influence of oil on our national policy, the growing influence of right wing religion on national priorities, and our growing culture of debt-and the main one in WEALTH AND DEMOCRACY, the growing economic inequality in the country (I would argue that on a practical level this is the major problem). The fifth is the massively bloated military-industrial sector. When over half of all government spending goes to the military, especially when there are no other military superpowers in the world, you have a long-term recipe for economic and political disaster. I hope that Americans begin to take note of the warnings found in these books. For the most part America seems to me a distracted nation, focusing on lesser problems or pseudo problems. Meanwhile, the problems that are beginning to undermine our nation and our democracy are largely ignored. This is a brilliant discussion of three of the threats facing our nation and I urge everyone who loves America to read it as quickly as possible and then hand it on to friends.

Kevin Phillips is a well-respected political analyst who is garnering hostility among right-wing reviewers precisely because his account of the rise of the Christian right is factual, objective and compelling. There is no bigotry in calling a political movement a political movement. Christian doctrine is broader, and Christianity more inclusive, than the narrow views and political boundaries adovcated by the religious right, the members of whom hide behind their religious beliefs when their political opinions and actions are challenged. I am a Catholic and a liberal democrat. Phillip's book -- which describes the perils to our nation caused by overdependence on oil, excessive debt, and the hijacking of the national agenda by relgious right -- is a must read for anyone who believes that freedom and justice for all is a higher value than domination by the zealous few.

Author, advisor, and academic Kevin Phillips is a man of considerable intellect. In the late 1960s he penned a signal work ("The Emerging Republican Majority") that successfully prophesized the ways in which massive socioeconomic and demographic shifts in American society from a northern and industrial one to one more centered in what he euphemistically referred to as the "Sunbelt". In detailing this momentous transformation, Phillips made some then-startling prognostications how such a shift in population and potential electoral votes would presage the long-term shift to a more conservative and Republican-oriented political majority for generations to come. Of course, being a conservative Republican himself, he assumed that this development meant greater fiscal responsibility, more rationally-based international savoir-faire, and much greater social stability. Yet, as he admits in his latest volume, "American Theocracy", that is hardly what the record reflects having transpired in the intervening thirty five years.

Instead, in this calm, clear, and well articulated tour of the social, economic, and political territory with which he is so familiar, Phillips describes the contemporary topography of conservative republican rule as being an inhospitable and ungovernable landscape pocked by craters of ideological fervor, fiscal insanity, and unspeakable personal greed. In many ways, his well-articulated broadside against the political right is all the more damning because it is not only from a true believer, but also from an outstanding academic with a persuasive resume, a man who carefully documents and substantiates everything he cites, especially in this scathing look at exactly where it is that the 21st century's form of rabid Republican conservatism is leading us. Yet one does not find here so much a prosaic attack on the present Bush administration as it is a penetrating historical analysis of how we got to this point in terms of three frightening enduring social and political trends, phenomena neither invented nor originated by the present administration.

Phillips sees three interlocking tendencies as now reaching a critical point in defining and even threatening the future of the polity. First is the rise of the corruptive influence of oil on both domestic and foreign policy; second is the rise of an intolerant form of radical Christian doctrine into key areas of public life; and third, the incredibly irresponsible increase in the level of both public and private debt. Each of these trends threatens to undermine both the short-term and long term stability of the nation, and each in its own way is a key factor in the way that describes how it is that both the Executive branch and the Congress are becoming increasingly beholden to special interests and are increasingly undemocratic. In particular, the fashion in which President Bush and the Congress have used permanent tax cuts for the wealthy as a device to transfer responsibility for future debt away from the wealthy and toward those with less means and less political voice, while at the same time insanely increasing that public debt, defies both morality and logic. Moreover, Phillips finds that the ways in which these trends are unfolding makes us as individual citizens and as members of the larger collectivity substantially less likely and immensely less able to determine our own future in anything resembling a rational and progressive fashion.

In many ways, this book represents a kind of sequel to Phillips original tome in the sense that herein he once again provides for the reader the sort of broad structural perspective illustrating the ways in which social, economic, and political change profoundly impact the future for both society at large and individuals in private, personal existence. In so detailing the powerful fashion in which these three powerful trends relate to each other and how they combine to impact the nature of American society itself, how they tend to push the nation toward ever more limited and ever weaker versions of its former substantial self, he also offers the reader an opportunity to understand the true nature of forces around us that demand public action now. This is an unnerving snapshot of America at a fateful crossroad, at a point that even the dullest among us must begin to recognize the palpable dangers. With the publication of this thoughtful and thought-provoking book, we can no longer say no one has warned us. Enjoy!

Kevin Phillips is one of the most widely read and acclaimed in this field. Of his many works, "The Emerging Republican
Majority" written 40 years ago in 1969, gives him the credibility, as well as his 13 other books since. "American Theocracy" discusses the 5 decades of growth many recent developments occurring in the US political, economic, religious and cultural realm in the GOP. He supports his points with lots of research and referencing.

Phillips states the GOP and US government are "a fusion of
petroleum-defined national security; a crusading, simplistic
Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding financial complex."

At one time, the GOP was the party of stability, order, low taxes, low spending, and small government (in theory at least).

The author notes the transition of the GOP to what many others think and believe today: In 2006, it's over. The Republican party can never argue again that it's the party of low taxes and spending, and small government. The 'big-government GOP' began long before The G.W . Bush administration, but Bush 43 has greatly exacerbated to shift to big spending, big
government, conglomerate control, and the erosion of personal
liberties and freedom of speech. Today there is a Cult of Personality and a lack of critical thought and even disdain -- to the slightest questioning or criticism of American domestic and foreign policy: Bushbots. Federal bureaucratic interference in education with the "No Child Left Behind," Act, and the promulgation of the pseudo-scientific "Intelligent Design." The federal government's interference in the Schiavo case is another clear example of many, noted in "American Theocracy."


Borrowed Prosperity:

"a preference for conspicuous consumption over energy efficiency and conservation,"

"Never before have political leaders urged . . . large-scale
indebtedness on American consumers to rally the economy,"

It was Phillips who coined the well-know term "The Sunbelt. Well, here's another: "National-Debt Culture."
Federal deficits, Social Security, Corporate debt, state & Local
bonds, and massive trade imbalances. "The Financialization of America."

American Per Capita Debt Ratios at Historical All-Time Highs:
On a per capita level, the real estate boom was in part caused by the 1997 "no roll-over" capital gains tax, subsequent tech crash in 2000, and the lowed interest rates in decades.

So what did people do as a result of the boom? Buy more stuff. How? By using their home equity as an ATM machine as they falsely believed they were "wealthier." Will there be consequences?
Perhaps. Perhaps, not.


Petro-Politics and the Military-Industrial Complex:

The U.S. government learned during WWII that high military and defense spending helps the US economy, provides jobs which in turn, spur consumer spending, while redistributing wealth to corporations (defense contracting companies).

Petro-Warriors:

When troops first went into Iraq, what was the first thing they
secured? the Iraqi Oil Ministry, and several oil refineries. One of the primary and public arguments for the invasion of Iraq by the US government was 1. it would help the U.S. economy and 2. it would cause oil prices to decline.


Potential Impact:

As for Phillip's latest, even more convincing is his perspective. He isn't a fan of the Royal Bush family, NOR does he see Hillary as a viable and effective alternative. If Americans can stop pretending that parties are really that different on the political spectrum they can realize, that American culture, habits and behaviour, will be the
deciding factor. However I don't see it happening.

This is a breakthrough book that will receive attention. It's not the first book published recently, that offers these opinions. But it's the credentials of the author, Kevin Phillips that will spur discussion. Things won't change; but things will be discussed. His objective historical notes about previously fallen Empires involved several historical facts that have occurred to other great powers in the past: global usurpation, religious intransigence, debt, and dependency on resources that are *outside* of the nation.

What Phillips is describing is not Earth shattering, bold, nor brave. Because it's a truthful observation based on statistical facts, not necessarily just opinion. And, it's a concept that happens to ALL empires over the course of world history. The Roman Empire declined over a period of 300 to 400 years. The United States does not seem to have that long. I suspect when it starts, which may be now, it will take 50 to 100 years. However, when it will begin exactly , is what we don't know. Like all of history, time moves on, and so does Earth's civilization.

Worth noting again, readers must disassociate themselves from their own natural biases. Like all books regarding the current political, cultural, and religious landscape: don't focus on opposing sides and viewpoints. Focus on the book's various perspectives and then apply to your perceptions. Then, deconstruct this book by yourself.

Finally, an author who takes on the most pressing national issue of the day. No, not gay marriage, but the kidnapping of Christianity in the name of political conservatism.

The deficit is unquestionably the biggest fiscal challenge facing this country; social security is floundering in the shadows; once again, American auto makers are discovering the need for smaller, more economical cars; Iraq is disintegrating even beyond the Fox New Channel's ability to hide the unpleasant truth; "Some people say . . ." is the President's favorite rhetorical device; your sons, fathers, and husbands are at risk of a being drafted as the saber rattling over Iran continues . . . but thank the almighty Lord Clinton is no longer in the White House.

This very faithful Catholic is looking forward to an excellent read.

A well researched look at the Evangelical right and their gradeschool level of Pollyannism politics which is chilling to even the most casual viewer. I highly recommend this book which will give you nightmares!

since I did not want to wait for shipping. Thanks to all those who reviewed it accurately (and apparently read the book before writing a review)

The details of the American theocracy movement (Dominion-ism and reconstruction-ism) were not really new to me having done extensive research over the past 10 years. I came into contact with some of the more rabid branches long ago and made it my business to keep tabs on the political takeovers of churches and homeschooling textbooks. The alliance of the radical right and the dominionist heresy is, if anything, downplayed a bit from it's reality.

The chapters on the politics of oil and the credit industrial complex, while made mostly from published evidence, is compiled in a very readable way that living through it as the flow of "current events" does not allow us to comprehend. Phillips lays it out in a narrative and style that ties those incremental changes together.

Sure the radical wing of Christians will not read it or will try to convince the mainstream christian denominations that it is somehow aimed at them, but the truth is, Philips has identified the biggest threat to Christians and to religious liberty that we have seen in the history of this country.

Remember, a theocracy will not tolerate a diversity of sects and denominations past the point where it gets power and no longer needs them.

Mr. Phillips has obviously struck a nerve with his latest book. A former Republican political strategist recognizes how his party, and our nation, has been hijacked by people who are either unable or unwilling to recognize the perils of religious fundamentalism; Muslim, Christian, or otherwise.

Excellent book, highly recommended.

This is a wonderful book for thoughtful conservatives who still believe that governement should (A) live within it's financial means, and (B) stay out of our private lives.

The only people who have criticzed this book are far right religious fanatics ... the very people that Phillips articulately warns us all about.

This is also a wonderful book for all those of us who believe that people should keep their religious views to themselves, stop shoving their religious zealotry onto the rest of us, and just mind their own business.

If, instead, you believe that government should spend spend SPEND, no matter how much debt we rack up, and/or believe that America should give up it's freedom and free thinking to instead adopt a Christian Taliban-like theocracy run by ignorant religious freaks, then this book is clearly not for you.

But for all thoughtful conservatives with half a brain, READ THIS BOOK ... it will fill up the other half.

Kevin Phillips is perhaps the best person to write a book like this - a Republican analyst, he can not easily be dismissed as someone with a lock-step animosity toward the Right wing. He analyses in the past, including the rise of the Republican party in the manner that it has, has been correct in many ways for several decades. Phillips writes in many ways as someone who is a court insider giving fair warning to the king - the kingdom has some troubles.

Phillips identifies three principles areas of concern - the rise of certain elements of religion into the political sphere, the problems of oil as a national addiction (to use the President's own words), and the growing crisis of deficit and economic mismanagement. Phillips is a political commentator with an eye toward history, he makes apt comparisons with empires of the past: the Dutch trading empire, the British colonial empire, and even the Roman empire provide parallels for the United States in the twenty-first century. One thing to note - the period of stability of empires has decreased over the millennia; whereas an empire like Rome might sustain itself for half a millennium, later empires were able to sustain themselves for less and less time. The United States has been the pre-eminent global superpower for less than a century, and is already looking at relative decline.

The problem with oil, according to Phillips, involves problems with both foreign and domestic policy as well as cultural issues. Rather than address growing needs, the Republicans in power have instead adopted a dangerous laissez-faire approach that threatens long-term stability, Phillips notes.

The problem with the deficit and finance is similar to this - the Republican party used to be the party of smaller government and less spending, but in the past twenty five years, it has only been a Democratic administration that has been able to get the budget deficit under control. This is the kind of fiscal management that again jeopardises the long-term for the country.

The problem of radical religion is not a new thing in American politics. While the country might not have been founded on quite the same principles being touted as Founding Fathers Theology today, it is true to say that religion has always had a role in the culture, and hence the politics of the nation. However, the danger is real - Phillips makes very telling comparisons with the ante-bellum situation of the North and South, showing how many issues prior to the Civil War involved religious dimensions, and how the long-term injection of religious radicalism can destabilise the culture (this works on both the Left and the Right, by the way).

In addition to a critique of the Right, Phillips has strong words for the Democratic opposition as well, in that there isn't any kind of consistent vision or organisation being offered in distinction from the incumbents.

This is a worthwhile book for anyone Left, Right or in the muddle (er, middle).

Kevin Phillips most recent book, American Theocracy, chronicles the growth of the Religious Right in the past 50 years. This book, more than any other, is a must read for anyone who in concerned about the philosophical direction of America in the 21st century. It is clearly and cleanly written with ample research and data to support its conclusions. Along with Mr. Phillips preceeding books, it forms a significant treatise on American policy and cultural shift. This is an exceptional book and should be read by everyone.
A

That was the question the president couldn't answer in his press conference earlier this week. If you want to understand why he couldn't just say "No, what are you, nuts?" - the answer's in here.

Highly recommended!

This is a five-star book that offers up two very serious values:

1) There is no other author who has written in such depth, over the course of four books, on the Republican party, the Bush dynasty, and the inter-relationship between the religious right and corporate wealth. This Republican is as serious an analyst as any that can be found. he joins Clyde Prestowitz, Paul O'Neil, and Peter Peterson as "go to guys" for when Senator John Edwards forms the American Independence Party and breaks away from the idiot Democrats and the Clinton mafia.

2) The author has done his homework and very ably integrated, with all appropriate footnotes and index entries, three broad literatures, two of which I have read multiple books on (oil and debt), one on which I have not (radical US religion--fully the equal of Bin Laden and suicidal terrorists, these folks just send others to do the dying for them).

So I have to say, given that this is a serious book by a serious author, why so many obviously loosely-read individuals writing short dismissive reviews? I have to conclude he has touched a nerve. When I used to appear on NPR, before I was kicked off for condemning Israeli lobbyists and suggesting that the common Arabs (the real people, not the sadistic opulent corrupt House of Saud or the other dictators) never got a fair shake from the US, I would get hate calls and mail from what I now realize were know-nothing radical right-wing religious nuts. We'd get into the issues, and I would ask, "what books have you read on this?" only to be told, "There is only one book that matters, the Bible."

Well, this author has helped me understand where the Bush constituency comes from: these are the folks that graduated from rote reading of the Bible to the "Left Behind" fiction series. They are the intellectual equals of the Islamic kids learning to be suicide bombers by reciting old Arabic they don't understand.

If you do not have the time or money to buy all the other books I have reviewed, spanning emerging threats, the lack of strategy and the inappropriate force structure, the anti-Americanism that we spawn, the corruption of Wall Street and the shallowness of white collar law enforcement, the end of cheap oil, the end of free water, the rise of pandemic disease, the coming date with destiny when the 44 dictators we support are overthrown and the US pays the price for its long-term nurturing of all but three of them....this book brings a lot together. It avoids only two really important topics: the environmental implications such as covered by TIME Magazine in the 3 April 2006 cover story on Global Warming; and the minutia of how America is no longer a real democracy--not only do most voters not vote, but once elected, most Congressman are corrupted immediately by lobbyists.

The author, who is uniquely qualified to sum this all up in this book because of his three prior books centered on the Bush Family, oil, and wealth, does a tremendous job of outlining how oil money ultimately bought the White House and Congress. If you have time for two other books, I recommend Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil in which a former LAPD investigator makes a case for indicting Dick Cheney for fabricating the march to war on Iraq under the delusion that we would get another ten years of "cheap oil" and Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy in which it is clearly documented that both Congress and the White House knew in 1974-1975 that Peak Oil was over, and they concealed this for another 25 years in order to keep the bribery coming--this was nothing less than a treasonous betrayal of the public interest worthy of retrospective impeachments for all concerned. The books by moderate Republicans Prestowitz (Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions) and Petersen (Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It) should be read as well as Brand Hijack : Marketing Without Marketing which is about why Paul O'Neil quit the Bush Administration--he realized that ideological fantasy and Dick Cheney had displaced a reasoned policy process, the Cabinet, and Congressional concurrence.....

This is a very bad time. This book is as good as any at setting the stage for intelligent people to campaign and vote in 2006 and 2008.

EDIT 7 Dec 07: Since I wrote this review, several gems are newly available:
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
Piety & Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freedom
God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (Plus)
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

and on and on and on....

It appears Kevin Phillips and Reagan-era conservative Bruce Bartlett, who wrote the recently published "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy", have a lot in common - both are longtime, die-hard Republicans who have gradually become more vocal critics of their own party. Their reluctance and resulting denunciation are borne out of their obvious mistrust of the current administration, which espouses values that coalesce into a series of irreparable policies that will linger far longer than Bush's tenure in the White House.

A former Republican strategist, Phillips is the one who wrote the blistering intergenerational biography of the Bush family with 2004's "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush". His tendency toward fact-finding remains consistent with this book, but this time, his scope is much broader than the power of a dynastic influence. The author systematically categorizes the triumvirate of forces that he sees are decimating the possibility of long-term economic recovery in this country. The first is our intractable reliance on oil, a dependency so entrenched in our daily lives that the Middle East holds court over us with their every political upheaval. Although the Bush administration claims the Iraq war is not about oil, Phillips does a meticulous job in delineating how it is completely about oil and how this represents a broader historical pattern of laying claim to energy resources not within our borders.

The second force is the red and blue state landscape that has polarized the citizenry to the point where influential voting blocks are mobilizing based upon value-based judgments. Phillips illustrates how the ascendancy of fundamentalist religion is not a new phenomenon to the U.S., nor have there have been examples in our history which support a long lasting impact of religion-fueled politics on our government. In the most interesting part of his comprehensive book, he goes further with the current geopolitical tensions at work, specifically how the divide between North and South is as pertinent today as it was during the Civil War and that in fact, how that conflict was as much about religion as it was about emancipation.

Much of the geographic analyses has been covered thoroughly in John Sperling's fascinating 2004 treatise, "The Great Divide: Retro Vs. Metro States" and Thomas Frank's more scathing study of political disenfranchisement, "What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America". However, Phillips really makes the strongest case in illustrating how the current layout of blue and red states is really a compass for the varying levels of religious fervor in the country and that church attendance says more about political allegiances than current pundits are willing to admit openly. His arguments give credence to the indefatigable belief that many Southerners have in feeling they are the chosen ones who are committed to the idea of American imperialism as a means to spread their beliefs to a heathen-dominated world. At the same time, this is not a simple diatribe against the red state constituents as left-leaning liberals are not spared. Their inability to mobilize is put to task with almost as much criticality in Phillips' treatment.

The third force Phillips discusses in great detail is what he labels the "financialization" of the economy, in particular, the unprecedented scale of the national debt. Similar to the points raised by Bartlett in his book, Phillips provides further evidence of how the Bush administration has done little to restrain the growth of government in feeding into the first two factors and in turn, allowed the gap between the rich and everyone else to widen. This is the least surprising point raised by Phillips' book but still an essential topic to cover in order to paint the cohesive landscape he does here. Even though all roads lead to the Bush administration, the author does not pave those roads with empty rhetoric but rather an abundance of facts, figures and reasonable historical analysis that sets his book apart from others on this subject. This is a strongly recommended read.

First of all, I have read the book. I try (paraphrasing another reviewer) to "keep tabs" on books that single out conservative Christians and attempt to smear them in the public square. It is interesting to me that the fans of this book take Phillips' arguments much further than Phillips actually does.

It seems that anyone who doesn't love this book is a "radical, right wing, illiterate, rabid, toxic, hateful, narrow-minded, lying, ambitious, proselytizing, power-mad zealot" with tendencies that are scarily reminiscent of Hitler, Hussein, and the Islamist terrorist militants.

My goodness, how the voices of "tolerance" and "reason" screech to drown out the voices of dissent. And how intensely bigoted these voices are; who then, has more reason to fear? If anyone is in danger of having their rights stripped, it would seem to be the conservative Christian minority in America.

Reading this book, I found myself agreeing with some of Phillips' points concerning our voracious appetites for oil and our inconsistencies in Mid-Eastern politics. I also strongly agree with him on our out-of-control spending as a nation. I will say, it is disingenuous to ascribe these behaviors to just one political party. There is plenty of blame for Republicans and Democrats alike.

However, it is extremely unfortunate that Phillips chose to attack America's Christians, who are not, it should be noted, out rioting in the street whenever they are mocked or their faith is slandered. They are not chopping off the heads of their detractors or sentencing Muslim converts to death. They are not imposing "Sharia" law nor are they blowing up rival houses of worship.

A little balance and perspective would have helped, in both Phillips' book, and in some of the more vitriolic reviews posted here. Attention forces of "tolerance": your true colors may be showing.

By the way, I am not a fan of Pat Robertson or of reflexive fundamentalist Christianity. But to tar all conservative Christians with the same brush is both inaccurate and irresponsible. I would have thought that Phillips would be above that kind of sloppiness and bias; I was wrong.

The latest prediction of American decline and fall is written by one of America's most astute political commentators, famous for having foreseen nearly four decades ago `the emerging Republican majority' Kevin Phillips in this work sees through a glass darkly. Three interrelated major elements in present American society are seen by him as seeds of future catastrophe. The first is America's dependency on fossil fuels as source of energy .The second is the increasing part played in American political life by right- wing quasi-fundamentalist religion. The third is the culture of debt, on private, communal business and governmental levels.
In regard to the oil involvement Alan Brinkley writes in his NYTimes review "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 - unusually dominated by oilmen - 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," in which the U.S. military works as 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 implies that the major reason that the U.S. entered Iraq was to secure oil supplies for the next thirty years. He points out that the U.S. troops in Baghdad surrounded the Oil Ministry there when first reaching Baghdad.
However this argument is questionable when one considers the present skyrocketing price of oil, the failure of the U.S. to have provided a more stable world - oil market. A more plausible criticism of the Bush Administration is not that they were motivated by securing energy sources in moving into Iraq, but rather that they did not carefully enough plan out to ensure the continued availability of Gulf oil for the U.S. consumer. And this in a world where the growing Chinese super-economy has already in a special deal with Iran secured long - term energy supplies, as it too forges a new relation with Saudi Arabia.
Philips draws historical parallels with other Empires that have collapsed. The American oil empire is compared with the Dutch 17th century Empire with its wind and sea power, and the British empire fueled by coal- both of the latter overextended themselves, and lost their historical primacy.
Such historical analogies may however be of limited value considering the tremendous complexity of factors involved in determining the present historical situation of the United States. The United States after all remains the great center of the world's `knowledge industry' and its superior universities and science- technological structure will no doubt produce innovations which will make the world look much different in a few decades than it does now.
Philips book is perhaps strongest in outlining the danger presented by the culture of debt, and fiscal irresponsibility. This extends all through American life and constitutes as many other commentators have indicated a possible source of international weakness. Here the problem also connects with the shrinking of America's industrial sector and the rapid economic development of other areas of the world. This concern is another source of Phillips indictment of the Bush Administration who he feels has abandoned traditional Republican principles of fiscal responsibility.
The centerpiece and main talking point of Phillips book is however given in its title. The role of Religion in determining American policy, the breaking down of the separation of Church and State, the seeming infiltration of ways of thought which do not suit rational political criteria mean for Phillips that the United States' policy is more and more enslaved to the `religious right'.
Phillips presentation is by all accounts rich not simply in wide-ranging and brilliant arguments confirmed by batteries of statistics but also by his broad historical knowledge.
In his previous works he emphasized another great American problem the growing gap between the `haves' and those who have a lot less.
I think it is wise to consider his book in connection with a number of others which also point to great dangers for America in the years ahead. Samuel Huntington in `Who We Are' focuses to the chagrin of many on the ethnic constitution of America, and worries about the loss of Protestant work ethic as driving force in the culture. Ted Fishman in his work on the rise of Chinese society as commercial empire is concerned about whether the United States will be able to retain its economic first- place in the world. The threats presented by international Terrorism, and the radical Islamic effort to not simply drive the United States from Iraq and the Middle East but to undermine its role in the world completely, constitute another complex set of threats and problems.
The rise of China, the recalcitrance of Russia and the possible Chinese-Iranian- Russian anti- American alliance bolstered by the weakness of Western Europe also threaten America.
Phillips has made a strong argument for certain dangers in the American future, but the proper evaluation of them would too require a more thorough elaboration of the unique strengths of American society and its traditions.

Kevin Phillips, the same arch conservative from 30 years ago who predicted the rise of the right, but he didn't imagine what it actually became. His vision was of a true conservative government of small government, and very little governmental interference. He now sees what has mutated out of this original vision, and it scares the hell out of him. And well it should. Imagine an American Taliban, dictating when and how we worship, keeping us in a state of constant warfare. It is a horrible vision of the future, and one that is all to possible.

As a former GOP strategist, Kevin Phillips has a viewpoint that other Bush Administration critics do not. He sees the multiple faults clearly and up close. His superb writing abilities have provided the curious reader a true gem. Put simply, GET THIS BOOK!

Phillips' broad knowledge and experience are only exceeded by his careful research and analysis. He takes aim at difficult and disturbing current events, and succeeds in making sense out of these unusual times. Big Oil, The Bush administration, Iraq, Iran, are only part of the problem. Rising, irrational and destructive evangelical beliefs, rooted in the supposed inerrancy of the bible, together with even more irrational beliefs in a present day Rapture and Armageddon, have taken a choke hold over important parts of society, government and policy. Phillips' analysis is often scary, yet it becomes patently (and painfully) obvious due to his interesting and informative historical perspective.

Phillips' analysis of our debt situation is sobering. Yet, this looming danger is being ignored by almost all of today's MSM. Phillips manages to convey his fears and analysis without ever sounding like a hysterical teenager, screaming about pimples and acne before a big date. To the contrary, his approach is all the more effective because his research and facts seem irrefutable.

One comes away with the strong feeling that this generation is seeing the destruction of America - not from "terra-ists" or those who "hate us for our freedom", but from incredible debt, peak oil, corporate mismanagement, a thoroughly incompetent Bush Administration and worst of all, the rise of evangelical beliefs which are actually damaging the country.

I would have no doubts that Mr. Phillips will suffer from threats, abuse and potentially dangerous situations caused by the ultra-religious right, but for the fact that most of those he so accurately describes probably have difficulties with words containing more than two syllables, unless they pertain to NASCAR or the bible. Add to that, his targets probably don't read anything outside the Tim LeHayne religious propaganda. Thus, we hope that Mr. Phillips remains safe from those extremists.

Mr. Phillips has provided Americans with an important, well-written, beautifully edited and impressive book. A generation from now, when historians look back at the fall and collapse of the United States, they will point to his book and say, "Ah, here is one guy who got it, and even warned about it, but like the oracles of old, he suffered greatly by being ignored simply because he was correct."

Some works of fiction make for great brain candy, and are fulfulling because they are hard to put down. Rarely does a non-fictional book take on difficult times, scary subjects and do it so well. Phillips' latest is hard to put down, even if his conclusions and findings are so disturbing. A highly recommended read.

The rise of the Christian Right in our country and government since 2000 has been truly frightening. It is unbeliebable what has transpired in our country since the Bush administration. Our government has been hijacked by the Christian Right, blurring the lines of church and state and pushing for a semi-theocratic government. I am not a Christian and recognize many so called "Christian values" are not moral or godlike at all. So where does that leave me and millions like me.
This doesn't seem like the United States anymore, the secrets, the king-like attutude of our president, cracking down on dissent and the press. The list goes on. We are truly heading down a dangerous road.
I was born and raised a Christian but Thank God I left that long ago. I believe in God but recognize Christianity as mostly fiction like any other organized religion. I know the history of Christianity, the creation of the Bible, the how, and the why. Most Christians are incredibly ignorant of their own religion and how it came to be.(that goes for any organized religion.) People do not want their belief systems shattered. They go into Christian shut down mode when confronted with lies, contradictions and inaccuracies of the Bible. It is just too disturbing for them and they go into automatic defensive mode. There is no critical eye, just blind faith. Christianity is man made, not God made. It is truly a primitive belief system. God wants you to question and discard the myths.
Hopefully someday if humanity survives, we will learn to let go of our primitive and stone age belief systems, they are killing us.
This well written and researched book shows the frightening and dangerous direction our country is heading in. God help us.

Phillips contends that from ancient Rome to the British Empire, every world-dominating power has been brought down by a combination of global overreach, militant religion, diminishing resources (eg. oil), and ballooning debt. He then goes on to document in detail that the U.S. is headed down the same path.

About 25% of Americans now are affiliated with fundamentalism/evangelical religion; further, this may understate the picture by leaving out Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. Their growth has been spurred by Roe v. Wade, rulings against school prayer, ERA, and the sexual revolution (includes gay rights, pornography, contraceptives). We have an elected leader who believes himself in some way to speak for God, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers and seeks to mobilize the churches, many Republican voters believe the government should be guided by religion, and a White House that seems driven by religious motivations (blocking the "morning-after" pill, limiting stem-cell research, insisting on an abstinence only approach to AIDS etc. prevention) and supporting biblical world views (eg. invading Iraq takes advantage of the religious right's seeing it as a step towards the "second coming").

As the new century began, average Americans consume twice the energy of Europeans and the Japanese, ten-times that of the world average. We are driving about 1/3 more than in 1980 (primarily due to living further from work) and 40% of vehicles are particularly fuelish "trucks." One objective of invading Iraq was to support the U.S. dollar by preserving the tie between oil and dollars (Iraq and Venezuela had switched to Euros); Iraq's oil reserves were seen as plentiful, cheap, and an opening for U.S. companies to take over - in addition, by increasing Iraq's production the U.S. would also be able to break OPEC's leverage, and we would have a new base to station troops in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia was no longer willing to host them).

Moving money around (finance, insurance, and real estate) has surpassed making things - 40% of GNP in '04, vs. 14.5%. Similarly, the Federal Reserve has regularly bailed out crises in the financial sector - 11 times; little attention, however, was given to manufacturing. Republicans have used interest rate cuts to fuel the economy through rising home values and lower interest rates. Meanwhile, since 2000 the entire new supply of Treasuries has been purchased by non-residents - mostly foreign central banks, despite negative real returns. At the same time, rising oil prices and increased U.S. needs from foreign sources will push the U.S. bill from $100 billion in '02 to an estimated $400 billion in '10, and the U.S. gets twice the return on foreign investments as foreigners get in the U.S. (Paul Krugman, in a 4/24/06 OpEd piece suggests that foreigners understate U.S. earnings to avoid taxes; U.S. firms overestimating foreign profits - untaxed until repatriated - is also possible.)

Phillips is at is finest in pulling all this together. He sees danger that U.S. defiance of Kyoto, its pursuit of pre-emptive war and an expensive military spread all around the world, our refusing the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, acceptance of poor pupil achievement and declining manufacturing strength, energy profligacy, negative savings, placing religion over science (eg. inhibiting stem-cell research and science education via "intelligent design") will make central bankers less confident of American economic strength, and thus more likely to precipitate financial crisis by declining to continue to fund America's record and rapidly growing trade, government, and family deficits.

The "good news?" That the strength of the religious right will sharply decline as America incurs dark days in the future - refuting their belief that we are God's New Israel."

Kevin Phillips' first and perhaps best-known book, "The Emerging Republican Majority," was written in 1967 and published in 1969. The reason for the delay was that it mapped out the "Southern strategy" for the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign. The strategy was to win over working class whites to the Republican Party. The strategy was so successfull that it has been used in every campaign since. In his new book, Phillips describes how this strategy has become a social movement and a powerful force in American politics. He goes further to describe how this social movement is entangled with America's dependence on foreign oil and debt, and how it will lead to our inevitable decline.

It has long been known that the US population density and political power is moving from the Northeast towards the "Sun Belt" states. (Every elected American president since 64 was from the Sun Belt.) This movement, which Phillips calls the "Southernization" of American politics, includes the infusion of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity. Phillips goes so far as to conclude that the Republican party is now the first religious party in American history.

Phillips tells us that the "premillenialist" evangelicals believe that the end is near and that they believe the final battle for civilization will be fought in the Middle East. He would also have us beleive that this is the driving force behind the Bush administration's decision to intervene in Iraq. Yes, Bush panders to the evangelical wing to get elected, but this has also alienated him from many secular and libertarian Republicans - not to mention budget-balancers and noninterventionists. I think Phillips overstates the influence of the evangelicals; in fact, as of late, it seems that their power is waning due to the widespread revulsion to their extremism. The faith-based view of the world is becoming increasingly at odds with the world of science and reason. Phillips term for this worldview is the "Dis-enlightenment".

The second source of our decline comes from our dependence on foreign oil. Phillips gives us a mini-history of how American civilization and power is based on oil. (The British empire was based on coal, the Dutch empire on wind, etc.) Oil, of course, is a non-renewable resource. Its production peaked in the US in the 1970's and it will peak worldwide in the next 10 to 30 years, depending on which expert you believe. This dependency is a danger if, as Phillips claims, America lacks the will and the flexibility to switch to alternative sources. Although I have little faith in the current fossil fuel administration, there is a glimmer of hope as the president is currently touring California and telling us that hydrogen is the wave of the future. I have great faith in America's ability to transform itself through technology, I just worry about the current vested interests.

Which brings us to the third source of our so-called decline. I worry even more about America's ability to control its spending. Our current accounts deficit is running about $700 billion annually, our national debt stands at about $8 trillion, and there is about $40 trillion committed to a retiring generation of baby boomers. Americans can't seem to elect politicians that want to raise taxes and cut benefits, and they have the unfortunate habit of spending more than they earn.

Some Republican critics have scolded Phillips for being on the side of the Democrats, but this is not the case. He dismisses the Democrats as not being serious contenders for leading the country. He loathed LBJ in the 60's and he loathed Clinton in the 90's. Rather he is an old-fashioned Northeastern Republican who believes in hard work, manufacturing (not financial services), balanced budgets, reason, and science. He abhors the Southern, faith-based, oil and debt-centered worldview of the current administration.

This book is good, not so much for its jeremiad about America's decline, but for its insights into the rifts within the Rebublican Party. The last chapter, "The Erring Republican Majority," is the best part of the book.

I usually avoid political books of this type, viewing them as mostly disposable and irrelevant once thier two-month topical shelf-life has expired. However, I was tempted into buying it for two reasons: the author is well-known for charting a course for the Republican party back in the 1960s which led to its current reliance on a southern, religious base (so he knows more than just a little about his topic). Second, I heard author Kevin Philips inerviewed on several different programs and I was intrigued by the authority and pragmatism with which he presented his thesis. Namely, that Americans have three things to fear: religious rule, dependence on a foreign product without which our current lifestyle and economy is impossible (oil) and, finally, crushing debt.

The book can get a little dry at times, but the background and the recitation of facts is necessary to truly put the present situation in perspective. This is no sensational name-calling book, it's simply an attempt to explain how American politics got to where it is today and what the practical implications are for the future. Philips provides such a well-costructed argument, that it's hard to ignore his concerns. If you're not concerned for our national future by the time you're through, you probably weren't reading carefully.

If you're looking for repetitious Bush-bashing, skip this book. While there are certainly indictments of Bush policy, Philips traces a much longer arc than simply the most recent administration. There's plenty of blame to go around...and it's been decades in the making. Beyond the already troubling issues of possible theocracy, future oil shortages and a ballooning debt economy, Philips draws many parallels to other historical superpowers which folded. America is charting a very close course with countries such as Spain and Great Britain, both of which ceased to produce actual goods that poeple could buy and which, towards the end of their reign, also shyed away from rational thinking in favor of a religious fervor which held that each was special in the eyes of god and, therefore protected from failure...a view that is, with benefit of hindsight, delusional.

In his latest book, Kevin Phillips draws an alarming picture of where we are politically and where we are heading.

Unlike other best-selling polemics, "American Theocracy" is extensively researched and, for the most part, persuasive.

Phillips, a former Republican strategist and current media pundit, has an impressive tack record. Almost four decades ago as a young political strategist for the Republican Party, he wrote a remarkable book called "The Emerging Republican Majority."

Published in 1969, he forecast the movement of people from the industrialized north to the south and the west would produce a conservative Republican majority that would dominate American politics for decades. The benefit, he wrote, was that it would restore stability and order to a society that was experiencing disorienting and at times violent change.

Although controversial at the time, it was the first book I read that forecast what, now, is history.

Shortly before publishing that book, the author joined the Nixon administration. He hoped to advance his forecast changes. Although a prolific political commentator, he has lost his enthusiasm during the ensuing decades for the Republican majority he forecast and helped create.

In his latest book, Phillips identifies three trends which threaten the United States' future:

1. The defining, yet distorting role of oil in foreign and domestic policy.
2. Religion's growing intrusion in politics and government.
3. Debt's astonishing growth.

Using these three themes, Phillips weaves a convincing and well-written condemnation of the failure of our leaders to look beyond their self-interest and immediate ambitions to plan for the country's future.

Although he continues the trend of his recent books to be critical of the policies of the current Bush Administration, for the most part, the author avoids inflammatory invectives

Rather he uses training as a lawyer, to deliver a skillful and thought-provoking indictment against this country's leadership. However, unlike his first book, Phillips fails to offer the reader an original prescription for this country's current problems.

Never-the less, this book's broad and structural discussion of political and social changes makes it worth reading. Phillips' passionless discussion draws a portrait of American society that readers may not welcome.

Yet, they will ignore it at their peril.

I heard the author on NPR and rushed out and bought the book. I was very disappointed. I think this book is full of esoteric insights about history and culture, and tries to tie things together that are just not there. For instance, just to give one example, the author talks about the oil/automobile complex that dictates U.S. policy. So what ? That is true in every country (Japan, Germany, France, etc.). Everyone has to drive to work, and thus, oil and cars are important. So what ? It is a banal insight, masquerading as profundity. The author then evern tries to tie this back to whale fishing in the 1700s, etc. I just didn't buy any of this.

Also, if there is a "car complex", then I would think it would affect the Democrats much more than the Republicans, the Democrats being centered in the northern auto-producing states like Michigan. Do you really think that Clinton was not influenced by the auto industry (SUVs and large trucks were introduced during the Clinton administration, not after Sep.11, as the author states, and the author provides a list of psychological reasons ["security"], why people wanted those large vehicles [the real reason is, Americans haul things like boats]. All this happend under a Democractic administration, not under the Bushes. The Democrats are much more likely to be "in bed" with the auto industry than the Bush family is.

Regarding religion, yes, the evangelicals are sometimes very weird [I personally don't want someone to have nuclear weapons, who believes that the 'End Times' are here, and the anti-Christ exists as a real person !]. Yes, they are powerful in terms of sheer numbers [100 million !], but as David Frum [ex-White House aid] said, in his time in the White House, one single large union in the U.S. put vastly more pressure on the White House in terms of wanting concrete legislation to be passed, than the entire "religious right", which mostly, in his view [he is a Jewish Canadian] want to "be left alone". What have the evangelicals actually accomplished at the national level in terms of real legislation and laws ? Have they overturned Roe vs. Wade ? I read the other day that Walmart is being forced to carry a contraceptive, even though it goes against the religious view of the company leaders and most of the customers. Is that the "religious right taking over" ? Name one "victory" that the evangelicals have achieved that really is significant (they can't get a stone tablet with the 10 Commandments put on state grounds, they can't get small stickers put on books stating the "evolution is a theory". At the 2004 GOP Convention, the evangelicals were not even allowed to speak, and were treated like "odd relatives", and pushed into the background, which to me shows that the GOP knows it can't win with them on a national level. [it should also be noted that Clinton spoke a lot more in his speeches about God and religion. In addition, Democrats like House speaker Nancy Pelosi can say things like "to us Democrats, the environment is a religious issue", and that is viewed as ok, but god-forbid if a Republican should mention religion and politics !!].

And whenever business interests collide with "social conservative" agendas, the business side ALWAYS wins (for example, Bush signing into law a new bankruptcy bill, which helped the financial industry, but hurt families). So this idea that the evangelicals are gaining the upper hand is not true. At the state level, I would say it is true (I live in Texas, and the Religious Right has basically taken over the GOP here, going so far as to insert all kinds of odd things into the party platform like, the U.S. should leave the U.N, which does in a way conform with Phillips' assertion that the "wackos" [which is a term a Republican lobbiest famously used to describe them] are taking over, in the south, at the state level]. But not at the national level. Re the financial aspects of the book, also true, but you can say that about Clinton or any president. Do you really think Clinton was not influenced by the "credit industry" (wasn't Bob Rubin, a cabinet member under Clinton, directly from that industry, for example] ?

This idea that the U.S. is just another "great power" in decline, and that what we see today are just signs of that ("religious extremism") to me is just "too easy" to really be true, and has already been said before in the book, "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers"; but that book I think was mostly discredited. One reason for "religious extremism" is just that in the U.S., we allow more freedoms than in other countries [which control the churches directly], and one reason why so many Ameircans are in debt is because we are a rich people and we are free and we like to buy things. We use a lot of oil because our country is very big, and the oil industry is very efficient. The strengths of our country are in software, finance, and entertainment, not in oil or cars. So, all in all, the book didn't do much for me.

The author states the old economic theory that if you make things, you are rich, but if you do finance ("move money around"), you are poor. Well, not true. Mexico makes a lot of things and has a strong manufacturing base, whereas Singapore and Switzerland are services and finance-based economies. And yet, those economies that "push money around" are vastly better off than Mexico, where people drive down to the factory to "make things". Japan also makes things, and has been in a 15-year macroeconomic decline.

If you are liberal Bush-hater, you will see all your beliefs reconfirmed. But I doubt this book will convince the rest of us.

In his book American theocracy, Kevin Phillips gives a frighteningly accurate view of the religious right. For the purposes of my review I will stay on the authors point of the Christian right and their agendas.

Phillips assessment of the dangers of biblical literalism isn't over stated. As Phillips points out the right believes that the decisions that they make are moving the world closer to the "end times" and the "second coming of Jesus Christ." For the men and women who truly believe this type of church propaganda their beliefs color all of their decisions. The leaders of today's administration truly believe that they are ushering in the end of the world and the return of their Messiah. Armageddon is not just a cataclysmic event; it is an actual place in the Middle East around the area we know as Iraq and Iran. Those government leaders who lead by "biblical design" and not by conventional wisdom or rational world views lead us into possible destruction.

Phillips is not exaggerating in his assessment of the situation facing the United States and other nations of the world. The fundamentalist Christian mentality could very well lead America into another world war. We are governed by leaders who speak of "Evil" powers that look to destroy our way of life with a blind eye to their own actions.

Phillips turns the focus back to ourselves and asks Americans to look at what they are doing and realize that it is our own actions that are leading us down a possible road to ruin. An eye opening expose on American ideals and the people who are pushing their apocalyptic agenda on an unsuspecting nation and world.

Kevin Phillips is one of a now rare community: a true conservative with deep felt convictions with whom one can disagree but nevertheless regard (and in turn be regarded by) as an honorable, upright individual. In American Theocracy Phillips analyzes the disturbing evidence that the United States, like the Roman Empire, the Dutch Republic, Hapsburg Spain, and the British Empire, is now experiencing numerous danger signs of a precipitous economic, political, and spiritual decline. With what must have been among the most painful words Phillips has ever written, the predictor of today's Republican dominance points the finger of blame squarely at the Grand Old Party and its leadership.

The book is divided into three parts. Parts 1 and 3 deal primarily with economic matters, Oil and Debt. The desire to control and protect petroleum supplies for the Western industrial economies is traced from the early twentieth century to the present. Like British dependence on coal in the 19th century, Western oil dependence has led us into questionable economic and political decisions and most recently has embroiled us in the Iraq debacle. Much of what he reveals has been reported before, but now we have all the links completed and the necessary conclusions made clear. In the third section Phillips again reveals his true conservatism, decrying the deficit spending and budget gaps and forewarning us of any number of probable disasters lurking in the future.

I wanted to discuss the second section most thoroughly since it hits closest to home with me: the influence of the American South and of "conservative" churches and denominations on the US political system. As a 15-generation Southerner with seven Confederate veteran great-great-grandfathers, I yield to no one in my pride in and love for the American South. Yet despite the fact that I still get a lump in my throat when I think of all those men in gray going off to fight for a hopeless cause, I am not morally blind enough to believe that all parts of that cause were noble or deserving of present day praise, and I find it deeply insulting when a political party attempts to gain my support as a Southerner by championing (albeit in kinder, gentler guise) that same cause today. Phillips makes it very clear that the GOP's Southern Strategy of fomenting racial divisions (which Phillips helped create) is alive and well. Phillips also decries the Republican distortion of religion: seeking political gain by cynically exploiting the fervor of truly believing and faithful Christians and causing good people to become convinced that the path to Heaven lies through an agenda of right wing social change injurious to their own economic and moral self-interests. Here again I am affected personally. I am a member of one of the churches targeted by the Republicans, and while our congregations, unlike the Southern Baptists and other denominations, do not typically take overt political actions, the atmosphere in some of our churches has become less pleasant for those members who do not agree with Republican politics. This distortion of religious faith is catalogued with great detail and readily apparent anguish by Phillips, particularly when he details the Republicans' readiness to exploit those who believe the theologically groundless rapture/end times doctrines.

Throughout American Theocracy, and particularly in the second section, Phillips warns the United States by drawing parallels with similar situations in past societies. He spares none of his party's leadership, particularly George W. Bush himself, who is either the most cynical of them all or a hapless stooge. especially their absolute refusal to take into consideration criticisms by other leaders here and abroad. He also warns that while the Republican coalition is too narrow and self-absorbed to govern effectively or even survive, the Democrats have not yet come up with a plausible alternative.

America should be grateful to Kevin Phillips, who has the courage to stand up and say that his own political party has abandoned honorable conservatism and has become captive to its Radical Right Wing. It is to be hoped that there is time before the 2006 and 2008 elections for principled men and women in all American political parties to take up the challenge and take our country back from Theocracy.

No policy answers or panaceas, but an impressive description and analysis of how the U.S. got into its present predicament(s).

I had heard brief commentaries by Kevin Phillips on the radio over recent years, and increasingly came to respect his analyses. Recently I picked up his newt book, American Theocracy. After a quick perusal - cover blurb, intro, and chapter headings - I started skimming (in my graduate student mode). Part I, Oil and American Supremacy, was easy to skim because many of these topics have been prominent in the news over recent years, including an assessment of how AND WHY how Bush et. al. put us in Iraq. Of particular interest were petroleum- related foreign policy cases from previous decades. By the end of Part I I was reading everything. The material is too meaty and interesting to skim, even for someone who always reads hurriedly.

I did not even try to skim most of Parts II (radicalized/political religion) and III (public debt and its associations). The were too interesting. As in Part I, the author brings together cases from distant historical epochs, drawing on a wealth of literature on the various topics, including some sources I had read (scholarly studies) over the years.

In sum, this is a valuable and interesting book, and 400 pp of text is not too long given the wealth of good material.

I must say that there is a severe problem in America concerning our ongoing dependance upon foreign oil (and oil in general). And our spiraling, out-of-control debt will be a concern for us the rest of our lives and for potentially many generations to come.

However, where Kevin Phillips really misses the boat here is that he launches a thinly-disguised attack against Christians in America. As others have noted, moral equivocation between law-abiding, patriotic American Christians and Islamist terrorists (both are called "radical" and "fundamentalist") does a disservice to people of faith and to the truth.

It is shocking and disturbing how many people are willing to buy into Phillips' twisted and bigoted hypothesis. If he really knew all that much about Christian Reconstructionism, he might know that many in that movement favor a no-deficit policy and also environmental conservation. To try to link fundamentalist Christians with deficit spending and oil dependance is a shady proposition.

Frankly, I think this book is simply an opportunity for Phillips to vent his spleen over his own frustrations that conservative Christians now have a stronger voice in Republican politics, whereas, 40 years ago...in the Goldwater era...they did not. However, Christians by and large now exercise less influence over American culture and government than perhaps they did in earlier times. A reading of our Founding Fathers or even later Presidents such as Lincoln and Wilson will show that Judeo-Christian philosophy once formed the very basis of our nation's Constitution and laws, and important public policies.

All in all, this is a very misleading book that uses viable concerns over oil and money as trojan horses for his poison pill of Christianity-bashing.

It's obvious this man has an axe to grind with conservatives but this book is just over the top and insulting. Phillips rants like a 3 year old most of the time which completely negates any credibility he had. Liberals love him because he worked for Nixon so that means he is "conservative" right? I don't think anyone would call Dick Morris a "liberal" simply because he worked for Clinton.
Phillips is just angry because he made predictions about a conservative collapse that never happened. Phillips is another liberal who can't figure out why everyone doesn't think like he does and he puts out the labels on these groups to prove it.
Don't worry, eventually there will be a swing back to the left, maybe in 2008. Then he can stand on his pedastal and proclaim he was right all along but in politcal timelines, he was a complete failure. If he was an advisor, what good would it do a candidate today to say that in 30 years there will be a swing back to the left?
Here are some of the problems I have with this book.

1. Classifies voters by the cars they drive.
2. Calls Southerners, Neo-confederates
3. Has no problem with the Middle East nationalizing of oil companies that we built
4. Calls us "Imperialistic." How many countries have we seized or how many refineries have we confiscated?
5. Surmizes our involvement in Yugoslavia was to protect oil pipelines. Why not? They're ours and we didn't start those conflicts!
6. Emphasizes Bush "regime" every chance he gets
7. Says the South votes based on race, so that means all Southerners are racist
8. Refers to the GOP as likening to Italian and German Chirstians. Thinly veiled attempt to label them as Nazis and Facists
9. Blames Carter's loss on Reagan invigorating the "ex-confederates" not on his horrible diplomacy and failed policy
10. He says "No war, not even Vietnam failed so utterly in it's unspoken objective." How does he know what it was if it was unspoken?
11. Says more intelligent people voted for Kerry. Kerry carried most to the welfare votes, that's not saying much.
12. Says the FDA blocked Intrinza and HPV vaccine. Intrinza was shown to be nominally effective and Merck has an HPV vaccine that was fast tracked with 100% efficacy. He is just dead wrong on that one.
13. Advocates the acceptance of the International Criminal Court's authority that would supercede our Constitution allowing them to pull any citizen of the US out of the country and try them for whatever crime they could conceive. This includes all military personel as well.
14.Says gay marraige acceptance is as high as 45%. Did you see the states that voted on it? It more like 10-20%.
15. Continuously says other countries don't like us. Do you think they really have our best interests at heart?
And here is my favorite and a great psychological confession of Phillips.
He states the symptoms of Fundamentalism and gives the following examples:
1.Prediliction to impose "God's will" and acceptance of Bible inerrancy- he relates this to the White House post 9-11 policy
2. Using the ends to justify the means - "accepting collateral damage"
3. Pursuing Holy War - the 1991 Gulf War
Notice how he completely disregards 1. Islamic predilication to impose Allah's will and acceptance of Koran inerrancy 2. the execution of Neck Berg and Daniel Perl and 3. the call for Jihad.
By not identifying these as evil he gives them not only moral equivalence but moral superioirity.
Here are some things omitted from his book.
1. Since our country is so utterly dependent on oil, we need someone in the White House who will defend it especially when we developed and own the technology and the factories that got it out of the ground.
2. Want to know why there is call to return to Christian morality? When people feel they have lost control over politics and politicians; when they feel they do not matter anymore, they naturally turn to religion. They blame the systems's failure on immorality. Bill Clinton was like adding fuel to the fire for this one. No wonder there has been a surge in fundamentlist evangelicals.
Are there any good points to this book, yes. Part 3 on debt was fascinating and well written. The focus on our dismal education system was good as well but as usual, no solutions were offered to correct either just the same old, we have to fix it, we have to get better. How Mr. Phillips?
If you are a liberal, you will love this book. It will give you a whole new lexicon to denigrate your conservative friends. If you are conservative then just read section 3.

I certainly hope that every American of voting age will read Kevin Phillips' newest book, "American Theocracy," but I suspect that is asking too much. Most of America's citizens, it seems, are too concerned with other interests than learning about what is going on in their country and how the current policies of their government may affect their future. This is not so much a criticism as simply an observation based on polls I've seen and "man (or woman!)-in-the-street" interviews I've heard on the national media. From that little evidence, I have surmised that not many ordinary people get concerned about the country's sociopolitical direction until it affects them personally.

That being said, I want to highly recommend "American Theocracy." I have read many of Phillips' books before this, but I think this may be his most important one yet. The author, for those who are not familiar with him, is a former strategist for the Republican Party, the very party which is now in control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. And this book is a devastating critique of contemporary Republicanism (the party, not the political theory!) and especially it is an indictment of the current Bush administration and its programs and policies.

Phillips clearly summarizes the present problem with the Bush White House in his preface: "Since the elections of 2000 and especially of 2004, three pillars have become increasingly central: (1) the oil-national security complex, with its pervasive interests; (2) the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and (3) the debt-dealing financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street." I could not agree more, and I've been an acute observer of national and local politics for over half a century (B.A. in political science, 1960).

Furthermore, as if to drive his point home, Phillips states later that the Bush family "...over multiple generations, has been tied to a politics that conjoined finance, national security, and oil. In recent decades, operating from the federal executive branch, the Bushes have added close ties to evangelical and fundamentalist power brokers of many persuasions." Again, later in the book, the author emphasizes that "More than any other U.S. political family, the Bushes exemplify the interaction of oil interests, the financial sector, the military-industrial complex, and the intelligence community."

I have no quibble with the oil-interest argument on the part of George Bush. I never thought from the beginning of the current Iraq War that we were interested in protecting anything else but oil for the American market. Although I temporarily accepted Bush's claim regarding weapons of mass destruction as a reason to attack Iraq, this soon made no sense, and I rejected that, and later it was shown to be fictitious. Since Saddam Hussein had not presented an immediate threat to the United States, I could only conclude that we had made a preemptive strike on an independent country without justification. In other words, under the "just-war" theory, there was no objective justification for doing what we, in fact, did.

The above refers only to Part One of Phillips' book which is titled "Oil and American Supremacy." This is only one leg of the problem which he discusses. Far more of a problem, in my view, is what he discusses in Part Two: "Too Many Preachers." The author says that "If anything, the United States of the early 2000s, for all that it lacked Britain's established church, was under George W. Bush in the grip of a considerably more powerful religiosity, constituency pressure, and biblical worldview." This is fearful stuff and demands attention. While Phillips probes into the web of the many characters who constitute the so-called "religious right" and appear to have influence over the Bush administration, one name especially popped out for me: the Reverend Tim LaHaye. He is involved with the "Left Behind" series of books which have become bestsellers in recent years and deal with the "end times" or Armageddon.

I became familiar with LaHaye and his writings back in the distant 1960s or 70s, as I recall. Sometime during that period, Reverend LaHaye, who is a fundamentalist Christian minister, wrote and published a book about sexuality and, more specifically, about homosexuality, even before that topic became the controversial issue it is today. I remember thinking at the time, after reading his book, what a piece of pseudo-scientific "garbage" it was and that this guy would never make it into the major leagues of book publishing. Well, evidently, I was wrong. LaHaye's "Left Behind" series has reportedly sold tens of millions of copies.

According to Phillips, "the surge of fundamentalist and evangelical religion in the United States, outlining the way a long tradition of radical and sectarian religion has taken an unprecedented political role under George W. Bush, as more and more Republicans think in apocalyptic terms and seek to shape domestic and foreign policy around religion." LaHaye is supposedly part of this "surge," as are Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson and others. If, in fact, Bush is being advised or influenced by people such as this, then that might explain why President Bush appears to be so little concerned about what is happening "now" in the world and hasn't tried much to communicate with the American public at large.

Part Three of the book, "Borrowed Prosperity," should be of interest to everyone, although it is also a retreat into the rather arcane subject-matter of economics and may be too dry to keep most people's attention. However, there is no doubt that current the public and private debt being incurred in America is a genuine threat to its future. The Bush administration is spending money like there's no tomorrow, and the average individual, according to Phillips, is spending more money than he or she makes in income. This situation has potential disaster written all over it.

This is must reading for everyone. Everything Phillips says is worthy of immediate attention.

No powerful country can survive the triple onslaught of indebtedness, military adventurism, and extremist religious addiction. Bush and his allies represent the worst possible scenario for America in the 21st Century. While including some excruciating historical detail, Kevin Phillips examines the most probable and dangerous outcome of American foreign policy based on biblical prophecy. In short, we are doomed unless common sense returns to government. The author is pessimistic.

It is a very sad fact that those on the political Left WANT to believe this kind of drivel. They want to believe the only reason for the war in Iraq was oil. They want to believe the head of Chevron can ring up George W. Bush and give him instructions. They want to believe the GOP is little more than a Christian Theocratic Party.

Those on the extreme Right are just as bad. They want to believe that Hillary Clinton is evil, planning to dispense with all private property and that the Democrats are little more than Marxist-Leninists who won't admit it and will close all Churches and deny their children the right to pray. Some of them even believe the UN will soon be sending troops door-to-door to collect their guns.

Worse still is that the Cable News and Broadcast News agencies want ALL of us to believe this is the way the world is today.

Just ain't so, children.

Most of the oil companies OPPOSED, not supported, the war in Iraq, fearing it would screw up supplies and cost them a fortune. The massive ENRON debacle began during the CLINTON administration (it just didn't surface until Bush) and BOTH parties have some blame to be left on their doorstop.

The world cannot be saved by mass transit, there is no secret solar panel design that has been hidden by the oil companies and the 300mpg carburetor is about as real as the Easter Bunny.

GET A GRIP, people. George W. Bush isn't some evil man who wants to see you in chains. He may well be limited in his view of the world, but SO IS EVERYONE. The average poor person in America is as unlikely to know about the problems (and there are many) of wealth as the average rich person knows about being cold and starving on the streets.

Kevin Phillips has been writing this same sort of crap for years. He has no evidence in solid fact to prove it, but legions will believe it because they WANT to believe it. Their black-and-white world would be really difficult to understand if we put it in Technicolor for them.

It is a lesson learned by every sophmore in college, and one apparently forgotten by most as they leave campus for the last time: "You can take any human situation or set of circumstances, and interpret them to mean whatever you wish." Currently, those on the left are eager to buy books that reaffirm their wish/fear that the United States is on the verge of some kind of conservative doom, where every American will be forced to worship Jesus and probably have to wear brown shoes with a blue suit while listening to hyms. This book fulfills that need, but in reality it is little more than fluff mixed with a dramatic but hollow and simplistic rehash of the current challenges facing the nation. Leftists enjoy the fact that the author is a former Republican, which presumably makes his words they feel - like those of say a reformed drug addict - especially credibile. Illogical nonsense, the fact he was a Republican does not in itself guarantee (though I admit there IS a correlation) that he is either intelligent or knows of what he speaks!

What Kevin Phillips misses entirely is the history of the United States, its people, and its culture. He doesn't "get it" when it comes the deep spirtual traditions of the American people, preferring to characterize them in political terms that simply don't apply. Intellectually, in this regard this work falls down as being dumb. As for all of his rantings against capitalism etc., once again he fails to demonstrate any real comprehension of how this country was built and what its success has been predicated upon. Every few years someone writes a book predicting the downfall of "freedom" or of American values or whatever. It sells books but it has nothing to do with truth.

File this work as an interesting artifact of a fading radical left in the United States and of the poverty in geniune intellectual thought in the public marketplace of ideas. In a year it and its "message" will be (and should be) completely forgotten!

"American Theocracy", the startling new book by longtime Republican Kevin Phillips, details a pessimistic view of the United States today and an even less rosy picture for the future. Phillips writes what an increasing number of Americans think.....the country is being run by religious right-wingers who have far too much power. Garnering and presenting facts and figures, Phillips is one to listen to as he also knows a thing or two about prognostication....he's been deadly accurate before.

It's refreshing to hear Phillips as he weaves together histories of Spain, Holland and Britain, how their empires grew and ultimately collapsed and their collective comparison to the United States today. The author centers on three areas about which Americans should be very concerned....our over-reliance on oil, our soaring debt and the frightening new religious base of the Republican party.

Phillips says that the connection of oil to the invasion of Iraq was one of the most underrated stories of the war. As George Bush would have liked it, the oil wells of Iraq would be under American control by now and we would be dictating who got Iraqi oil and how much it would cost. The immense failure of the Bush team in Iraq is but one of a plethora of disasters brought on by the current administration. Phillips, an ardent foe of the Bush "dynasty", mirrors the view of a majority of Americans who feel that Bush is inept. He minces no words about it, either.

The author is good at relating how and why the debt is a growing problem. The loss of manufacturing as a basic tool in the American economy has been replaced by finance. As he points out, certain preceding empires (the ones mentioned above) all began with agriculture as an economic base and proceeded through to climaxes which ended in reliance on finance. He speaks of "rentier cultures"...("rentier" being a French word that means a person living off unearned income... the United States now having a myriad of people in that category) as one sign of an empire's doomed fate.

Regarding religion, (the last of the three areas upon which Phillips discusses) the mainline Republican party of a generation ago went south, turned hard right and discovered religion. The fringe elements became the core and made the present-day Republican party the first truly religious party in our history. Here Phillips gets most impassioned, and for good reason...the anti-science, pro-faith, Armageddon-waiting fundamentalists have stripped the once middle-of-the-road Republican party of their respectability. The dangers, he reminds us, are that this new core of Republicans are in control of all three branches of government. They've caused havoc already and haven't ceased yet.

"American Theocracy" sometimes has a textbook feel to it as Phillips writes as he sounds on tv.....informative, but dry. What he has to say, though, however provocative, should be a wake-up call to those millions of Americans who want to turn the country around. I highly recommend this book for its forthright message and terrific insight.

Thank god for the Internet to bring about forums like this to share views on very important issues, which are brought about in "American Theocracy". Unfortunately the major majority of the American public has no idea what is going on. They get their information from newspapers, television, radio, etc.. A quote from Ted Tuner "95 % of what we read, see, or hear is controlled by five companies, this is not good". Did the majority of the public know before the Iraq war, that in 2000 Sadam Hussan started selling his oil for euros instead of dollars? Are we being censored in our own country? Another important read for all is "Petroldollar Warfare" by William R. Clarke. I think our founding fathers would turn over in their graves if they knew what was going in our country today.

As someone who grew up in a conservative mormon household, went to a conservative mormon college and was one of the 17% of BS degrees granted in the sciences in 2001, I can tell you that Mr. Phillips research and ideas are on point.
Yes, the republican party is leaning more and more heavily on biblical phrases and broadly supports a "biblical worldview." Yes, Mormons, and many other evangelical and protestant groups, are teaching that evolution is a lie, that the earth is "full enough and to spare" with respect to natural resources and that the end is nigh.
Yes, Mormons and many other groups are teaching lax fiscal strategies from the pulpits. For example the Mormon prophets have gone from teaching saving to teaching that we should not wait to have children until after our debt is managed.
We are falling behind as a nation, especially in math and science. We are over-burdened by debt and using our homes as ATMs. We are unwilling to conserve our resources our invest in our country's future. We are at war with Iraq because we need oil. My husband, while serving overseas did spend all of his time guarding Iraqi oil platforms. And this war was sold to us as a battle of good v. evil, not as a resource war, which it is.
And as a geologist I can tell you that we are nearing the maturation point for Saudi oil supply.
This book is a wake-up call for America. It is time to individually look at our finances and at our futures and change our ways. Otherwise, yes, we will follow the decline of the other great nations who came before us.

This is a must read for anyone concerned about the future of the U.S. It clearly points out the danger we are in by having the government allow religion to govern their policies.

I've only got a few minutes so I'm sorry if I sound rushed -- we're passing a rattlesnake around tonight while we speak in tongues. It's not as easy as it sounds.

His quote on page 241: "Conversely, the states where abortion rates were highest supported Kerry. Culturally the Kerry states ranked higher--in number of symphonies or universities and even intelligence quotients--hints that the kind of single people and couples drawn there would put less emphasis on families that did the religious citizenry, more caught up in fecundity and the idea that children are gifts of the Lord.
(Merriam-Webster): FECUNDITY 1: intellectually productive or inventive to a marked degree: 2: fruitful in offspring or vegetation.

I was both before I got married.

So what's his beef with liberal parents? Do they hate their children? Do they really put less emphasis on their children than they do on symphonies (his words not mine)? I don't think so. I think he just spews trash faster than his brain can consider what his fingers are typing.

For example, in that same paragraph he takes this cheap shot at Republicans. "Culturally the Kerry states ranked higher--in number of symphonies or universities, and even intelligence quotients-" Hey, I resemble that remark.

Commonly cited IQ figures for various groups
Group IQ avg Citation

RED-Jewish Americans 113 Herrnstein & Murray (1994)
RED-East Asians 106 Herrnstein & Murray (1994) Lynn (1991a)
MOST REDS-Whites 100 Herrnstein & Murray (1994) Lynn (1991a)
MOST REDS-Hispanics 89 Herrnstein & Murray (H&M) (1994)
Native Americans 89 Lynn (1991a)
African Americans 85 H&M (1994) Lynn (1991a) Roth et al. (2001)
NONE-Subsaharan Africans 70 Lynn (1991a)

He spends 400 pages ranting about how others have and are making all the wrong decisions. Well I look at the dust jacket and I've decided that I don't want him deciding what "culture" means to me. I love Classical music --. I truly do. My wife introduced me to it 24 years ago but I never really put a theocracy value on it until I was unfortunate enough to read that passage. For our boy Phillips to define culture as simply "Symphonies" and "number of universities" is laughable.

I'm going to Darlington Raceway next week (367 Laps/501.3 Miles; Track Layout: 1.366-Mile oval) and if I tell my friends that American culture is defined by European Classical Opera and Symphonies, they will rip my #20 Tony Stewart NASCAR jersey right off my back and ban me from the tailgate. Sure Aaron Copland and Gershwin are well-represented in our collection but those two fellas don't exactly tear up the NPR airwaves.

I was out late with Billy (an affair with some tramp that my wife is convinced of) so she put blankets on the sofa last night. While I waited for the beers to kick in (lumpy sofa) I checked his 2000 election numbers. He was right. The blue states kicked ass in the "symphonies block". Of over 800 orchestras in the American Symphony Orchestra League the Democrats walked out with 63 more than the KKK when the smoke cleared. Strange thing for a man without an axe to grind to gloat over; but I was the one who checked his numbers after all.

Of over 2,500 universities in the U.S. the blue states won 244 more universities than the Confederate states -- but in defense of the Slave-owner banjo strumming fundamentalists, there were some pretty "questionable" blue universities.

Academy of Chinese Culture and Health Sciences
Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College
American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine
Dell'arte International School of Physical Theatre
Institute of Transpersonal Psychology

Check this horticulture class: Course Description: "Alternative light sources for plantings in spare bedrooms or closet spaces."
What the heck is that all about?

Before I go, let me bring this up. The book is parted in threes. The third part is called Borrowed Prosperity. On page 274 there is a chart (FIGURE 7) named "The Great American Debt Bubble (Act II)

If you look at the time progression along the bottom you will see that the STEEPEST progression of "total credit market DEBT as a share of GDP" was during the CLINTON Administration. Now, here is my problem with Mr. Fairness. If you use the index for a word count, the word "Bush" is mentioned 40 times in part 3, while the word "Clinton" is mentioned only 1 time and even then he was only referenced to the subject of election politics, not debt.

Gotta go, I gotta hankerin' for some snake venom and good old fashioned fire and brimstone! Halleluyah praise Jesus and natural bush.

God bless Kevin Phillips. His heart is in the right place: against the rule of the oil companies, against rampant globilization, and especially against the radical Christian Right. But he tries too hard in this book to join together many things which don't really belong together.

The heart of this book is an attack on and analysis of the Christian Right in America which is probably the greatest danger to democracy America has ever faced. Phillips admirably demonstrates the tactics and goals of the religious Right and the Southern base it depends on. One can only hope he is right in seeing a tremendous backlash against this use of mindless religion to turn American back hundreds of years.

He is also right in seeing the evil influence of the oil companies on American government and the dangers of excessive indebtedness.

What hold these themes together is only the fact that George Bush is president: a man controlled by oil, oblivious to financial disaster, and beholden to the evil Christian fundamentalists. The fact that Bush, a man from the elite of New England, could embrace redneck Christianity is appalling enough. His father also went to Texas and started eating pork rinds. When you leave the Northeast anything can happen!

But Kevin Phillips tries too hard to connect these to something more than George Bush. He tries, for instance, to show that the empires of the past -- Rome, Holland, Britain, -- all failed because of religious excess. Actually they failed because of their competition -- especially the British competition with the Dutch and the German competition with the British. I would love to believe that religion had a place in the decline of these empires -- since I believe religion to be a serious mental disease -- but Phillips cannot establish this. George Bush is the only connection between fiscal, energy, and intellectual decline -- bad enough to be sure, but not explicable in Phillips' imagined way.

Nevertheless, if people take this book seriously they will at least become vigilant against the Christian fanatics who seem hell bent on destroying this nation. Our involvement in Iraq is what they have accomplished and we must guard against it ever happening again. The first thing to do is to vote Bush and all Republicans out of office totally. Phillips demonstrates that the Republican Party is the anti-American party and the party of repression and ignorance.

I heard the author on NPR and rushed out and bought the book. I was very disappointed. I think this book is full of esoteric insights about history and culture, and tries to tie things together that are just not there. For instance, just to give one example, the author talks about the oil/automobile complex that dictates U.S. policy. So what ? That is true in every country (Japan, Germany, France, etc.). Everyone has to drive to work, and thus, oil and cars are important. So what ? It is a banal insight, masquerading as profundity. The author then evern tries to tie this back to whale fishing in the 1700s, etc. I just didn't buy any of this.

Also, if there is a "car complex", then I would think it would affect the Democrats much more than the Republicans, the Democrats being centered in the northern auto-producing states like Michigan. Do you really think that Clinton was not influenced by the auto industry (SUVs and large trucks were introduced during the Clinton administration, not after Sep.11, as the author states, and the author provides a list of psychological reasons ["security"], why people wanted those large vehicles [the real reason is, Americans haul things like boats]. All this happend under a Democractic administration, not under the Bushes. The Democrats are much more likely to be "in bed" with the auto industry than the Bush family is.

Regarding religion, yes, the evangelicals are sometimes very weird [I personally don't want someone to have nuclear weapons, who believes that the 'End Times' are here, and the anti-Christ exists as a real person !]. Yes, they are powerful in terms of sheer numbers [100 million !], but as David Frum [ex-White House aid] said, in his time in the White House, one single large union in the U.S. put vastly more pressure on the White House in terms of wanting concrete legislation to be passed, than the entire "religious right", which mostly, in his view [he is a Jewish Canadian] want to "be left alone". What have the evangelicals actually accomplished at the national level in terms of real legislation and laws ? Have they overturned Roe vs. Wade ? I read the other day that Walmart is being forced to carry a contraceptive, even though it goes against the religious view of the company leaders and most of the customers. Is that the "religious right taking over" ? Name one "victory" that the evangelicals have achieved that really is significant (they can't get a stone tablet with the 10 Commandments put on state grounds, they can't get small stickers put on books stating the "evolution is a theory". At the 2004 GOP Convention, the evangelicals were not even allowed to speak, and were treated like "odd relatives", and pushed into the background, which to me shows that the GOP knows it can't win with them on a national level. [it should also be noted that Clinton spoke a lot more in his speeches about God and religion. In addition, Democrats like House speaker Nancy Pelosi can say things like "to us Democrats, the environment is a religious issue", and that is viewed as ok, but god-forbid if a Republican should mention religion and politics !!].

And whenever business interests collide with "social conservative" agendas, the business side ALWAYS wins (for example, Bush signing into law a new bankruptcy bill, which helped the financial industry, but hurt families). So this idea that the evangelicals are gaining the upper hand is not true. At the state level, I would say it is true (I live in Texas, and the Religious Right has basically taken over the GOP here, going so far as to insert all kinds of odd things into the party platform like, the U.S. should leave the U.N, which does in a way conform with Phillips' assertion that the "wackos" [which is a term a Republican lobbiest famously used to describe them] are taking over, in the south, at the state level]. But not at the national level. Re the financial aspects of the book, also true, but you can say that about Clinton or any president. Do you really think Clinton was not influenced by the "credit industry" (wasn't Bob Rubin, a cabinet member under Clinton, directly from that industry, for example] ?

This idea that the U.S. is just another "great power" in decline, and that what we see today are just signs of that ("religious extremism") to me is just "too easy" to really be true, and has already been said before in the book, "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers"; but that book I think was mostly discredited. One reason for "religious extremism" is just that in the U.S., we allow more freedoms than in other countries [which control the churches directly], and one reason why so many Ameircans are in debt is because we are a rich people and we are free and we like to buy things. We use a lot of oil because our country is very big, and the oil industry is very efficient. The strengths of our country are in software, finance, and entertainment, not in oil or cars. So, all in all, the book didn't do much for me.

The author states the old economic theory that if you make things, you are rich, but if you do finance ("move money around"), you are poor. Well, not true. Mexico makes a lot of things and has a strong manufacturing base, whereas Singapore and Switzerland are services and finance-based economies. And yet, those economies that "push money around" are vastly better off than Mexico, where people drive down to the factory to "make things". Japan also makes things, and has been in a 15-year macroeconomic decline.

If you are liberal Bush-hater, you will see all your beliefs reconfirmed. But I doubt this book will convince the rest of us.

I heard his interview on NPR and was impressed with the degree of synthesis the author put into his arguments. I now have read the book and can say that this theme carries throughout the book.

I look for books that help me to see current events in a larger context- its historic roots, its interconnections, its causes and effects. This book does this. In fact- that is the major point of the whole book. It is well written, insightful and engaging.

Wow, did you know that America's piety, dignity, and adherance to Biblical principles are driving it to the edge of destruction? You know, just like Rome was destroyed because of it's righteousness and pure lifestyle? What a laugh! the only people who think that America is, at present, a Christian nation, are a few ill-educated Mullahs in Iran, and a few over-educated leftist professors at Columbia, Princeton, and Berkley.

To call this book "factual" is like saying Maureen Dowd and the NY TIMES are just "telling it like it is" with no bias involved whatsoever. This book is shoddy scholarship and as such, is terribly disappointing. Phillips paints with such a broad brush that his hysteria comes off less as analysis and cogent, toughtful criticism and more as the spittle-tinged spewings of a bitter old man.

I must say that some of the reviews here (which call Christianity "rabid" and "radical" and "scary" and "Pollyanish") are themselves frightening to consider. It would seem that David Limbaugh, in his book "Persecution," may not have been so far off in his allegations that the increasing attacks on Christians in America are part of a growing trend.

The danger in America is not that Christians are "about to take over," but that certain secularists would severely limit their Constitutional rights to free speech and freedom of worship if they only had the chance. These secularists would do to Christians what the truly radical Muslims are already doing to Christians in places where Sharia law is in place. Isn't it ironic, that Phillips finds himself on the side of many radical Muslim clerics?

How messed up is that, man?