Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy

Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy
By Stirling Newberry
t r u t h o u t | Book Review
Wednesday 22 March 2006

"In assessing their political motivations, coming years will see thousands of ex-urbanites - now fully 10 percent of the national electorate - stretched out, figuratively at least, on psychiatrists' couches and sociologists' survey sheets. Still, a few conclusions already seem obvious. Family values are central - if by this we mean having families and accepting lengthy commutes to install them in reasonably safe and well-churched places."
American Theocracy, page 61

Kevin Phillips speaks with a crisp authority on demographic forces and their effects on political affiliation. He has followed, by his own admission, the Republican Coalition, at first as an enthusiastic supporter, and now as a harsh critic, for almost half a century. The author of The Emerging Republican Majority now entitles an entire chapter, "The Erring Republican Majority":

"No explanation of the theme of this book - US Oil Vulnerability, excessive indebtedness, and indulgence of radical religion - can ignore the encouragement of the Republican Party and its electoral coalition, especially since 2000 ...

"The Republican electoral coalition, near and dear to me four decades ago, when I began writing The Emerging Republican Majority, has become more and more like the exhausted, erring majorities of earlier failures ..."
American Theocracy, page 348

But how does Mr. Emerging Republican become Mr. Submerging Republican? He tells a story, that of America in decline, beset by problems which are indicative of a society that has passed its peak and is headed to the bottom: holding on to the economic past, the rise of "dis-enlightenment" and a culture of religious hegemony, and the financialization of the economy. All of these points have been made before, but not by someone like Phillips. His oil critique is familiar to anyone who has followed the discussion of "peak oil," or heard of the "twin deficits" problem. The identification of Christian Reconstructionism as the social focus of the oil culture is also a point made before. Finally, his critique of the financialization of America and the rise of debt has sounded from Paul Volcker, Brad Setser and Lester Thurow.

Kevin Phillips begins to outline these three pillars with the acceptance of the argument that America's economy is the petro-economy, and that there are three dangers that follow directly from this:

"The Glory of the 20th Century is now the burden. Oil has soaked deeply - in all likelihood indelibly - into the politics and power structure of the United States, partly because over two bountiful centuries it has also seeped, spouted, and oozed up from so many sections of so many states. More than a fuel, oil became a heritage and also the basis of a lifestyle."

He argues that this produces a capital dependence in America, namely that more and more of what we have relies on the petroleum economy. He argues that this means that there is a petroleum way of life. The "energy culture" of oil combines with the oil lifestyle to produce an oil politics. This oil politics is what allowed George W. Bush to build a coalition that allowed him to invade Iraq, even though he had a very weak political mandate.

Phillips connects the oil lifestyle and the backlash against the civil chaos of the 1960s and the "social engineering" of LBJ. He argues that the South, as the core of rejection of the values of the liberal coalition and as the area where the era of roads brought with it the most change, became the dominant political partner in American politics - that "The Civil War is no longer the height of southern ambition."

This first part of the argument - of oil dependency and the coming of peak oil - is not new with Kevin Phillips, in fact, it is a story that has been told elsewhere. Nor is the geopolitics of oil economics new here, this too has been recounted before. But Phillips is not an economist, nor really a historian, but a social critic. He seeks to find the textures and tapestries that bind people to their political affiliations. He identifies a force which others have identified, namely the evangelical and fundamentalist form of "Christian Reconstructionism," and that this social movement, when joined to the flow of money from the oil economy, is driving the transformation of the Republican Party into America's first religious party.

And to the three part story of decline - an America in thrall, not merely to oil, but an economics of oil, a sociology of oil and a politics of oil - Kevin Phillips adds the demographics of polarization. Perhaps the most compelling argument that he makes is that Reagan's coalition was national and Bush's coalition is local. That across the northeast and west, Bush scored double digits less than Ronald Reagan. That, despite the occasional genuflections in the direction of Ronald Reagan, Bush is rooted in the grandiose politics of the South and has more in common with LBJ's "imperial Presidency" than with Reagan.

But what causes him to reject the "rosy scenario" that all of this is a sign of American strength? Kevin Phillips, you see, has seen the effects of Peak Oil on this structure, realizes that the result is an America that lacks the economic flexibility to deal with what comes afterwards, the political vibrancy to forge a different consensus, and most importantly, the intellectual integrity to recognize the danger. He calls this "Dis-enlightenment." A faith-based view of the world that derives neither from the literal word of the Bible, nor from the world of science and reason, but instead, from a mythology of rapture and redemption which, while drawn from Biblical sources, is separate from mainstream theology.

It is this last point which is Kevin Phillips' intellectual wedge. He is not a man of the future talking to those who are looking forward, as most writers on such subjects as Peak Oil have been. Instead, he is a modern, a man who believes himself the friend of reason and rationality. In the intellectual arsenal of the neo-classical modern, the charge of being "counter-enlightenment" is one of the most harsh available. It is akin to charging someone with being irrational and disconnected from reality, progress, and the fundamental virtues of the life of the mind.

Kevin Phillips begins to sound like a Democrat, when what he is, in fact, is a technocrat. One who is steeped in Puritan values, as he from time to time demonstrates in his moral disgust at Bill Clinton's affair - but nonetheless an individual who believes in numbers, and in the stories that they tell. He sees both the decline of American initiative, and the decline of the Republican Coalition that he backed with such fervor in 1967.

He joins these two narratives in Christian Reconstructionism. He repeatedly mentions the Left Behind series and the pre-millenarian narrative that they are an expression of. This "faith-based" world view is what he identifies as the source of the ability to create a story that led to Iraq - the overthrow of Babylon - and the ability to cover over in public debate the questions of global warming and oil depletion.

His sources are the normal ones that are quoted in solid publications - Roach of Morgan Stanley, Brian Setser, Hubert King, even Paul Krugman from time to time. While he occasionally accepts the less probable of explanations, there is little that would not pass muster in any rigorous debate on the topic. He is not arguing that cabals, conspiracies or hidden forces are moving America. In this, he has taken a very positive step forward. His last book seemed to focus on the rich and distant being far more to blame than ordinary people. In this book, he provides the complementary piece - of why someone like Bush would be given the kind of broad power he enjoyed for so much of his presidency. The lust for security, righteousness, and continuity produces an electorate that has lost the fundamental virtue to resist the siren call of a Deficit Society and a Culture of Corruption.

In this he speaks, not to progressives, but to conservatives. He looks at conservatism of things, such as the capital of petroleum, and the conservatism of totems, which is religious zealotry, and rejects them. Kevin Phillips is still a conservative in his heart, but what he is attached to, what is worth conserving to him, is something quite different, namely, a kind of moral rectitude and self-sufficiency. Thus, late in his books, his chapters on debt and the financialization of America - where America ceases to lend, and instead borrows, and ceases to make, and instead consumes - read with the same moral indignation that any sermon might have. He looks upon the "rentier class" with the same kind of disdain that others might reserve for drunkards. In his hands, the phrase "post-industrialism" takes on the same kind of epithet-like quality that the word "post-modern" might in another context. It is this moral outrage, this basic return to a Puritan ethic of making and selling, and not some conversion to liberalism, that guides Phillips. It is why he longs for a revived Republican Party, rather than throwing his lot in with the Democrats directly.

For many who read these pages on a regular basis, and perhaps have read my own "American Thermidor" article on the cycle of deficits and "The Fourth Republic," linking religion, money and constitutional upheaval - the argument that Phillips makes should be familiar, even if it is one variation among many. However, this book marks another step forward in what is going to be the great political story of the years ahead. Just as the South and the resource economy, especially in the South and Appalachia, have de-aligned from the Democratic Party, a corresponding movement is afoot. The Northern Republican, who sees himself as the bearer of moral rectitude, paying one's debts and orderly mainstream religion, for all of its Elmer Gantry-ism, is now de-aligning from a Republican Party that is increasingly alien in its rejection of reason, sound money, sound business and the need for an economy based on the tangible commerce of making things and selling them at a profit. He sneers at the excesses of consumption, such as SUVs, with the same sense of sin that another might express at homosexuality.

The danger, as Phillips sees it, is rather an old one. And to use an example he does not, it harkens back to the fall of France's economic prosperity in the 1700s. As the iconographic Catholicism of that age became increasingly rigid - lead by an expansionist and increasingly religiously rigid "Sun King" - it drove out the industrious, symbolically focused, and entrepreneurial Protestants. France would go through Phillips' cycle of decline - a simultaneous exploitation of energy culture to its limit, religious extremism and bloating of debt and military adventurism - in the 1700s.

This book then represents not a volume that progressives need to read, but one that they need to give. Because Phillips does this without reference to the liberal or progressive totems in society; he disdains Lyndon Baines Johnson as much as he ever did; he has not accepted the "liberal-left" ideology. Instead he longs for the days when we were guided by an "invsible hand," rather than kicked by the "invisible foot" of debt. For the days when sensible men of commerce made decisions based on data.

For the days when men like Kevin Phillips had a place in the councils of power. It should be a stark warning that even Mr. Emerging Republican is no longer Republican. When he looks forward and sees both major party nominees as members of political dynasties, and argues that both will accept the militarization and continuation of American decline, as much as Phillips might condemn the apocalyptic religion of Christian Reconstructionism, he too believes that end times are at hand, and filled with the signs of coming end times.
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Stirling Newberry is an internet business and strategy consultant, with experience in international telecom, consumer marketing, e-commerce and forensic database analysis. He has acted as an advisor to Democratic political campaigns and organizations and is the co-founder, along with Christopher Lydon, Jay Rosen and Matt Stoller, of BopNews, as well as the military affairs editor of The Agonist.