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March 19, 2006 copyright NYTimes. go to their site to read the complete review 'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips Clear and Present Dangers Review by ALAN BRINKLEY Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In writing "The Emerging Republican Majority" (published in 1969), he asked a very big question about American politics: How would the demographic and economic changes of postwar America shape the long-term future of the two major parties? His answer, startling at the time but now largely unquestioned, is that the movement of people and resources from the old Northern industrial states into the South and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the "Sun Belt") would produce a new and more conservative Republican majority that would dominate American politics for decades. Phillips viewed the changes he predicted with optimism. A stronger Republican Party, he believed, would restore stability and order to a society experiencing disorienting and at times violent change. Shortly before publishing his book, he joined the Nixon administration to help advance the changes he had foreseen. Phillips has remained a prolific and important political commentator in the decades since, but he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th) looks broadly and historically at the political world the conservative coalition has painstakingly constructed over the last several decades. No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness. (His final chapter is entitled "The Erring Republican Majority.") In an era of best-selling jeremiads on both sides of the political divide, "American Theocracy" may be the most alarming analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have appeared in many years. It is not without polemic, but unlike many of the more glib and strident political commentaries of recent years, it is extensively researched and for the most part frighteningly persuasive. Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future. Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost at Columbia UniversiRead full review
The title of this book sounds interesting. Unfortunately the book does not live up to the title. It contains a few tidbits of interesting history (assuming that they are accurate), but the story line really goes nowhere. The author exceeds the most liberal of politicians in his ability to say nothing in tens of thousands of words. He reaches few conclusions and those few are illogical. My take is that he is a born again liberal who would like to shore up the philosophy of liberalism, but lacks the intellect to do so even if it was possible, and I don't believe it is possible, because liberalism is simply another religion, based upon misplaced faith rather than logic and knowledge of what is really workable. I'm sorry I wasted my time on the book and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Gary S.Read full review
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Mr. Phillips uses other past empires to help us understand where we, in the US, are headed in the very near term. To have been written before the current meltdown in the economy Mr. Phillips has hit all the nails on the head. If you had read it, and shorted Country Wide or Bears Sterns you could be rich. But as Mr. Phillips states to what end. We may well be past the "Event Horizon" of the Black Hole that radicalized religion has helped drag us into. Read, get ready, harder times are ahead.
Brings together historical insight and political savy while discussing the extreme pressues our democracy is under from the impending oil crisis, radical religion at home and abroad, and the false prosperity we are experiencing which has been bought with and increasingly burdensom public and private debt.
This book was excellently written, thoroughly researched, and altogether fascinating. I highly recommend this work to anyone who has the chance to read it,a and an interest in the topic. My next task is to find his other books and study them carefully...
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