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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dear Visionaries,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Read on if you're interested.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>All the best,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Linda Pall</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>By Kevin Phillips<BR>Sunday, April 2, 2006; B03<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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."<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR><I>Kevin Phillips is the author of
"American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and
Borrowed Money in the 21st Century" </I></DIV></BODY></HTML>