Kevin Phillips: American Theocracy

If you haven't read or are not reading Kevin Phillips new book, American Theocracy (New York: Viking/the Penguin Group, 2006), get it and read it.

It is a book "from America's premier political analyst, an explosive examination of the coalition of forces that threatens the nation in the twenty-first century."

Here, I'll make it easy for you:

American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips from amazon.com


From the Preface:

          "... U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has two dimensions. 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 already 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 elections of 2000 and especially of 2004, three pillars have become increasingly central: (1) the oil-national security complex, with its pervasive interests; (2) the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and (3) the debt-dealing financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street. In December 2004 The New York Times took up the term "borrower-industrial complex" to identify one profitable engine of exploding consumer debt.
          "That name does not quite work, but we can hardly use a term like the credit-card / mortgage / auto-loan / corporate-debt / federal-borrowing industrial complex. This is a problem still searching for its Election Day Halloween mask. In any event, the rapid ballooning of government, corporate, financial, and personal debt over the last four decades goes a long way to explain why the finance sector, debt's toll collector, has swollen to outweigh the manufacture of real goods. We are in the midst of one of America's most perverse transformations.
          "George W. Bush has promoted these alignments, interest groups, and their underpinning values. His family, over multiple generations, has been tied to a politics that conjoined finance, national security, and oil. In recent decades, operating from the federal executive branch, the Bushes have added close ties to evangelical and fundamentalist power brokers of many persuasions. These origins, biases, and practices were detailed in my last book, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (2004). The present volume, therefore, revisits mostly the family's influence in helping these trends and guiding these constituencies.
          "Over three decades of Bush presidencies, vice presidencies, and CIA directorships, 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, if not in full agreement with one another. 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 Lincoln's election in 1860."

- Kevin Phillips
American Theocracy

"It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

- Abraham Lincoln
The Gettysburg Address

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

Abraham Lincoln, (attributed)
16th president of US (1809 - 1865)