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

by Kevin Phillips (Author)
Key Phrases: leading world economic powers, micropolitan areas, religion gap, United States, White House, Middle East (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The title of political analyst Phillips's latest book may overstate his case (in the text, he prefers the term "theocratic direction"), but his analysis likely will strike chords among those troubled by our current political moment. Phillips (American Dynasty) expounds upon historical parallels for each of his three subjects. In his section on "Oil and American Supremacy," for example, he points to Britain's post-WWI involvement in the Middle East as an analogy to Iraq, and in his section on radicalized religion, he warns of "the pitfalls of imperial Christian overreach from Rome to Britain." The five major measures of U.S. debt—from national to household—keep setting records, he observes in his section on "Borrowed Prosperity," and the real estate boom spurred by the Federal Reserve, he argues, cannot continue. Phillips identifies the escalating clout of the financial services industry and suggests that Americans should emulate policies in Asia that encourage savings and in Europe that encourage manufacturing. The lesson of the past, he warns, is that intractable national issues "generate weak and compromising politicians or zealous bumblers." A critic of the Bush family, Phillips sees little hope in Hillary Clinton. Expect him to make some provocative appearances on chat shows. (Mar.)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Few political strategists have relied so extensively on history to understand the American political system as Kevin Phillips. Often identified as a former Republican strategist, Phillips has made a career of charting his disillusion with the GOP in books such as American Dynasty, a blistering look at the Bush family. His latest, American Theocracy, continues this scrutiny -- with mixed results.

American Theocracy is three books in one. He argues that a "reckless dependency on shrinking oil supplies, a milieu of radicalized (and much too influential) religion, and a reliance on borrowed money . . . now constitute the three major perils to the United States of the twenty-first century."

His first worry is oil. "Over the last several hundred years each leading global economic power has ridden an emergent fuel resource into the pages of history," he notes, citing Britain's 19th-century reliance on the coal industry as an example. But such reliance can prove disastrous if that resource dries up, which Phillips believes will happen. Citing the more pessimistic of geologists' projections about declining global oil reserves, he argues that our dependence on oil has ushered in an era of "petro-imperialism" that spawned the war in Iraq.

Phillips is equally pessimistic about the emergence of a "debt and credit-industrial complex" that endangers the U.S. economy's foundations. "Historically," he writes, dominance of an economy by the financial-services industry, as has now taken place in the United States, has been "a sign of late-stage debilitation, marked by excessive debt, great disparity between rich and poor, and unfolding economic decline." He's clear on who's to blame: the supposedly conservative Republican Party, which, rather than governing in a fiscally responsible manner, has compromised the country's future out of both "ignorance of history and a classic onset of greed."

But as the book's title suggests, it is the religious right that most occupies Phillips. He is not subtle in his descriptions of this group: "The rapture, end-times, and Armageddon hucksters in the United States rank with any Shiite ayatollahs." The GOP has been transformed into "the first religious party in U.S. history," Phillips argues,