American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century

Citation

Phillips, K. (2009), "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century", Society and Business Review, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 82-83. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465680910932504

Kevin Phillips is very well known, in the USA, as Commentator and Essayist. His favourite matters are: politics, economics and history. Phillips can be linked to the American polemists tradition. Phillips was a senior strategist for Nixon's 1968 campaign and his The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) is widely considered as a major opus in political science. Since that period, Phillips was dropped by the Republican Party and he has become of its harshest critics. He also published: Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of American Rich (2002). His latest book is Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and Global Crisis of American Capitalism (2008) that we will be reviewed, with Galbraith: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008) at the next Society and Business Review.

The book is divided in three parts. Each of them is dedicated to one of the three main perils that threaten the USA, and beyond, the world. There are: oil, borrowed money and radical religion.

The first part “Oil and American Supremacy” shows how the history of the American economic development is also the history of a growing oil dependency. For Phillips, oil dependency has shaped and distorted the American domestic and foreign policy to a “petro‐imperalism” that reached to the war in Iraq.

The second part “Too many Preachers” is the core of the book or the main Phillip's concern or obsession. Phillips begins considers that the religious Christian radicalism is now a major force within American politics and government. For Phillips, the Republican Party has transformed itself into the first religious partly in the US history. He even speaks of the “southernization of America” (as if the South should have won, ideologically or culturally, the Civil War). Phillips esteems that this religious radicalism reaches to an “American Disenlightenment” that ignores and even fights the scientific knowledge and rejects, in fact, the separation of church and state. Nevertheless, Phillips admits that this radical religious substratum does not actualize in concrete policies since most of theocratic legislation has been not adopted by the American Congress.

The third part “Borrowed Prosperity” debates about the incredible levels of debts – current, potential and prospective – that both the American people and government have been compulsionnary accumulated for years. The US society is now a “national‐debt culture” according Phillips. The urge amount of debts endangers the US economy's foundations. Phillips proposes the expression “financialization of the United States” to describe how the American economy has been reshaped from a focus on production, manufacturing and wages, to a focus on speculation, debt, and profits. Notice that Veblen (for example: The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times. The Case of America (1923)) warned against such tendency. Phillips put the blame on Republican Party for this catastrophic situation which, rather than governing in a fiscally responsible manner, has compromised the US economical future by ignoring the fiscal fundamentals.

Oil dependency, radical Christianism and urge debts are three massive roped trends that were not created by Reagan and Bush administrations but they have supported them. There are also the fruit of the incapacity of the American leaders – whatever their political colours – to look beyond their own and country's immediate ambitions and desires. In sum, the (so called) republicans since Reagan have betrayed the real Republican political approach.

The book is easily readable. But, it is a more an essay writing than a scholars one with all the advantages and the defects of such kind of writing (especially the sources used by Phillips that can be questioned). Meanwhile, this book sounds now prophetic (like his 1969s one). Phillips brings nothing new since each of the three parts refers to subjects that are now well documented. He only linked them by imputing them to the perversion of the Republican ideal by Bush administrations. More generally, this belongs to a set of works that have been published for about ten years that have denounced the contemporary American capitalism as being, for the USA and the world, no preposterous (at least for the majority of people), ecologically disastrous, democratically alienate and consubstantially warrior. The main question is to know if it is the government – the politics – or the main corporations – the business – that give birth to this form of capitalism.