How the Theocracy Will Kill Us

I hate to offer a book review based on only a partial reading of the book, but I'm really taken with Kevin Phillips' new work, "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century." Phillips was an architect of Richard Nixon's political resurrection in 1968 and, in his first book, "The Emerging Republican Majority" in 1969, accurately predicted that the American political landscape would undergo a seismic shift that would bring conservative Republicans to power by the end of the century.

Unlike your blogger here, Phillips is no liberal. But he's aghast at what's happened in the political shift to the radical right in the United States during the past decade.

Here's a conservative with whom I can do business: He's intellectually conservative, rather than ideologically so. He relies on evidence and history to make his arguments, rather than the typical right methodology of screaming down opponents to silence.

So what's Phillips' argument this time? It's that there are three trends threatening to undermine America's status as the one true post-Cold War superpower of the world: Our addiction to oil (he builds the case that the time of both Holland and England as dominant world powers ended because of each nation's inability to recognize that its dominant means of energy production was no longer competitive in the world), the Republican Party's slavish reliance on the Christian right for its political muscle (and the resulting Armageddonish visions of the party and policy makers), and the nation's out-of-control public and private debt.

The war in Iraq is a product or cause of all of the above. And, chillingly, Phillips makes the following note:

Past leading powers have eventually suffered from imperial hubris--a misplaced cocksureness that leads them into a strategic overreach they can no longer afford. The result has often been a humbled hegemon, left with crippling debt burdens, lost trade advantages, a stricken currency, and increasing vulnerability as rivals increase their stature as creditor nations, financial centers, and technological innovations.

Can you say "Chinese century"?