Monday, March 20, 2006
What's the Deal with Kevin Phillips?
In the Times today Alan Brinkley favorably reviews Kevin Phillips's American Theocracy. Brinkley describes the book as a well-researched and "alarming" analysis of the current American political milieu...
which is all fine and good ... but what I found interesting, and maybe I'm just being slow on this one, was that the guy who predicted and lauded the ascendancy of the hard right in 1969's The Emerging Republican Majority apparently jumped ship a long time ago. I've seen Phillips appear as pundit before, but I had no idea it was the Emerging Republican Majority Kevin Phillips...
Anyway, I think it's positive that in American Theocracy Phillips apparently makes an argument in a mainstream NYT-reviewed book that is usually relegated to leftwing publications: that there is a connection between the crises being manufactured by current American policies and the rise to political dominance of Christian fundamentalism. Phillips argues that one reason the culture of debt has flourished recently -- huge national and huge corporate debts, etc. -- is because voters who think the world is about to end don't mind if you rack up a huge IOU for future generations. The same point can be made about the destruction of the environment and much more.
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.
which is all fine and good ... but what I found interesting, and maybe I'm just being slow on this one, was that the guy who predicted and lauded the ascendancy of the hard right in 1969's The Emerging Republican Majority apparently jumped ship a long time ago. I've seen Phillips appear as pundit before, but I had no idea it was the Emerging Republican Majority Kevin Phillips...
Anyway, I think it's positive that in American Theocracy Phillips apparently makes an argument in a mainstream NYT-reviewed book that is usually relegated to leftwing publications: that there is a connection between the crises being manufactured by current American policies and the rise to political dominance of Christian fundamentalism. Phillips argues that one reason the culture of debt has flourished recently -- huge national and huge corporate debts, etc. -- is because voters who think the world is about to end don't mind if you rack up a huge IOU for future generations. The same point can be made about the destruction of the environment and much more.
