[Vision2020] Kevin Phillips' Republican Reason for Penance?

[keely emerinemix]

Fascinating stuff, Linda, and I'm glad you shared it with us.

Not that I have strong feelings about civic religion and faith conformed to 
prevailing political winds or anything . . .

keely


From: "Linda Pall" <lpall at moscow.com>
To: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Subject: [Vision2020] Kevin Phillips' Republican Reason for Penance?
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2006 14:22:25 -0700

Dear Visionaries,

Sorry to pester today but I came upon this highly interesting article 
written by Kevin Phillips, the intellectual father of the Nixon shift of the 
late 1960s and early 1970s. While he was aghast at the Nixon betrayal, he 
managed to keep his political eyesight within normal deviations over the 
years and has written a number of thoughtful books (which I generally 
disagree with but which make me think about my own presuppositions). This 
column is one that makes me want to sit down with a Republican true believer 
and ask the hard question: Is it really true?

Read on if you're interested.

All the best,

Linda Pall


By Kevin Phillips
Sunday, April 2, 2006; B03

Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma 
of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be 
president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become 
the first religious party in U.S. history.

We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before -- in Puritan 
New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the 
United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on 
display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a 
ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the 
certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by 
religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly 
animated by biblical worldviews.

Indeed, there is a potent change taking place in this country's domestic and 
foreign policy, driven by religion's new political prowess and its role in 
projecting military power in the Mideast.

The United States has organized much of its military posture since the Sept. 
11, 2001, attacks around the protection of oil fields, pipelines and sea 
lanes. But U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has another dimension. In 
addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the White House is courting 
end-times theologians and electorates for whom the Holy Lands are a 
battleground of Christian destiny. Both pursuits -- oil and biblical 
expectations -- require a dissimulation in Washington that undercuts the 
U.S. tradition of commitment to the role of an informed electorate.

The political corollary -- fascinating but appalling -- is the recent 
transformation of the Republican presidential coalition. Since the election 
of 2000 and especially that of 2004, three pillars have become central: the 
oil-national security complex, with its pervasive interests; the religious 
right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and the 
debt-driven financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of 
Wall Street.

President Bush has promoted these alignments, interest groups and their 
underpinning values. His family, over multiple generations, has been linked 
to a politics that conjoined finance, national security and oil. In recent 
decades, the Bushes have added close ties to evangelical and fundamentalist 
power brokers of many persuasions.

Over a quarter-century of Bush presidencies and vice presidencies, the 
Republican Party has slowly become the vehicle of all three interests -- a 
fusion of petroleum-defined national security; a crusading, simplistic 
Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding financial complex. The three are 
increasingly allied in commitment to Republican politics. On the most 
important front, I am beginning to think that the Southern-dominated, 
biblically driven Washington GOP represents a rogue coalition, like the 
Southern, proslavery politics that controlled Washington until Abraham 
Lincoln's election in 1860.

I have a personal concern over what has become of the Republican coalition. 
Forty years ago, I began a book, "The Emerging Republican Majority," which I 
finished in 1967 and took to the 1968 Republican presidential campaign, for 
which I became the chief political and voting-patterns analyst. Published in 
1969, while I was still in the fledgling Nixon administration, the volume 
was identified by Newsweek as the "political bible of the Nixon Era."

In that book I coined the term "Sun Belt" to describe the oil, military, 
aerospace and retirement country stretching from Florida to California, but 
debate concentrated on the argument -- since fulfilled and then some -- that 
the South was on its way into the national Republican Party. Four decades 
later, this framework has produced the alliance of oil, fundamentalism and 
debt.

Some of that evolution was always implicit. If any region of the United 
States had the potential to produce a high-powered, crusading 
fundamentalism, it was Dixie. If any new alignment had the potential to 
nurture a fusion of oil interests and the military-industrial complex, it 
was the Sun Belt, which helped draw them into commercial and political 
proximity and collaboration. Wall Street, of course, has long been part of 
the GOP coalition. But members of the Downtown Association and the Links 
Club were never enthusiastic about "Joe Sixpack" and middle America, to say 
nothing of preachers such as Oral Roberts or the Tupelo, Miss., Assemblies 
of God. The new cohabitation is an unnatural one.

While studying economic geography and history in Britain, I had been 
intrigued by the Eurasian "heartland" theory of Sir Halford Mackinder, a 
prominent geographer of the early 20th century. Control of that heartland, 
Mackinder argued, would determine control of the world. In North America, I 
thought, the coming together of a heartland -- across fading Civil War lines 
-- would determine control of Washington.

This was the prelude to today's "red states." The American heartland, from 
Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico to Ohio and the Appalachian coal states, 
has become (along with the onetime Confederacy) an electoral hydrocarbon 
coalition. It cherishes sport-utility vehicles and easy carbon dioxide 
emissions policy, and applauds preemptive U.S. airstrikes on uncooperative, 
terrorist-coddling Persian Gulf countries fortuitously blessed with huge 
reserves of oil.

Because the United States is beginning to run out of its own oil sources, a 
military solution to an energy crisis is hardly lunacy. Neither Caesar nor 
Napoleon would have flinched. What Caesar and Napoleon did not face, but 
less able American presidents do, is that bungled overseas military 
embroilments could also boomerang economically. The United States, some $4 
trillion in hock internationally, has become the world's leading debtor, 
increasingly nagged by worry that some nations will sell dollars in their 
reserves and switch their holdings to rival currencies. Washington prints 
bonds and dollar-green IOUs, which European and Asian bankers accumulate 
until for some reason they lose patience. This is the debt Achilles' heel, 
which stands alongside the oil Achilles' heel.

Unfortunately, more danger lurks in the responsiveness of the new GOP 
coalition to Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists and Pentecostals, who 
muster some 40 percent of the party electorate. Many millions believe that 
the Armageddon described in the Bible is coming soon. Chaos in the explosive 
Middle East, far from being a threat, actually heralds the second coming of 
Jesus Christ. Oil price spikes, murderous hurricanes, deadly tsunamis and 
melting polar ice caps lend further credence.

The potential interaction between the end-times electorate, inept pursuit of 
Persian Gulf oil, Washington's multiple deceptions and the financial crisis 
that could follow a substantial liquidation by foreign holders of U.S bonds 
is the stuff of nightmares. To watch U.S. voters enable such policies -- the 
GOP coalition is unlikely to turn back -- is depressing to someone who spent 
many years researching, watching and cheering those grass roots.

Four decades ago, the new GOP coalition seemed certain to enjoy a major 
infusion of conservative northern Catholics and southern Protestants. This 
troubled me not at all. I agreed with the predominating Republican argument 
at the time that "secular" liberals, by badly misjudging the depth and 
importance of religion in the United States, had given conservatives a 
powerful and legitimate electoral opportunity.

Since then, my appreciation of the intensity of religion in the United 
States has deepened. When religion was trod upon in the 1960s and thereafter 
by secular advocates determined to push Christianity out of the public 
square, the move unleashed an evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal 
counterreformation, with strong theocratic pressures becoming visible in the 
Republican national coalition and its leadership.

Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq -- widely anathematized 
by preachers as a second Babylon -- the Republican coalition has also seeded 
half a dozen controversies in the realm of science. These include 
Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of 
global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of fossil-fuel 
depletion, religious rejection of global population planning, derogation of 
women's rights and opposition to stem cell research. This suggests that U.S. 
society and politics may again be heading for a defining controversy such as 
the Scopes trial of 1925. That embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a 
generation, but the outcome of the eventual 21st century test is hardly 
assured.

These developments have warped the Republican Party and its electoral 
coalition, muted Democratic voices and become a gathering threat to 
America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a 
captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge 
and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the 
papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the 
astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of 
our solar system.

Conservative true believers will scoff at such concerns. The United States 
is a unique and chosen nation, they say; what did or did not happen to Rome, 
imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic and Britain is irrelevant. The catch 
here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God 
was on their side. The revelation that He apparently was not added a further 
debilitating note to the late stages of each national decline.

Over the last 25 years, I have warned frequently of these political, 
economic and historical (but not religious) precedents. The concentration of 
wealth that developed in the United States in the bull market of 1982 to 
2000 was also typical of the zeniths of previous world economic powers as 
their elites pursued surfeit in Mediterranean villas or in the country-house 
splendor of Edwardian England. In a nation's early years, debt is a vital 
and creative collaborator in economic expansion; in late stages, it becomes 
what Mr. Hyde was to Dr. Jekyll: an increasingly dominant mood and facial 
distortion. The United States of the early 21st century is well into this 
debt-driven climax, with some analysts arguing -- all too plausibly -- that 
an unsustainable credit bubble has replaced the stock bubble that burst in 
2000.

Unfortunately, three of the preeminent weaknesses displayed in these past 
declines have been religious excess, a declining energy and industrial base, 
and debt often linked to foreign and military overstretch. Politics in the 
United States -- and especially the evolution of the governing Republican 
coalition -- deserves much of the blame for the fatal convergence of these 
forces in America today.

Kevin Phillips is the author of "American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics 
of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century"


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