In the just-published paperback edition of American Theocracy, I replaced the old 9-page introduction with a new 40-page version. Part of the reason was to update the book in the light of the 2006 elections and the passage of another year relative to oil, debt and the Middle East. But a second motivation was to clarify how and why the book was written.
Since the 1998 publication of my book The Cousins' Wars, which discussed the centrality of religion in the three principal English-speaking wars -- the English Civil War, the American Revolution and the American Civil War -- I have had an enlarging view of the role religion has played in U.S. wars and politics. The election of George W. Bush, followed by the massive religification of his rhetoric and his Mahdi-like posture after 9/1, crystallized a new and dangerous wave of this old proclivity.
Over the decades, I have used two lenses in looking at the historical trajectory of the United States. The first was politics -- the emergence of the dominant Republican national coalition, which harked back to my 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. The second was a measurement of the U.S. against the backdrop of the factors that caused or symptomized the decline of the previous leading world economic powers, most recently Britain. By both yardsticks, the emergence of George W. Bush was profoundly negative. The more I got into the subject, the more I learned and the more concern I felt. The new introduction provides more amplification.
In a nutshell, the Southernization of the GOP, beginning back in the 1960s and 1970s, wound up in the 1990s and 2000s concentrating so much of the religious electorate in the Republican party that the Bush-era GOP started tilting toward radical religion on a number of domestic and foreign policy dimensions from doubt about evolution and skepticism of science to a biblical sense of the U.S. role in the Middle East.
Over more than two decades, my research on the extent to which the United States has begun to mirror past slippages has noted five particular symptoms of prior leading economic power decline: 1) a sense that the nation is on the wrong track or has lost its compass; 2) the rise of imperial, state-allied or crusading religion; 3) a move away from older broad-based economics (agriculture, industry. maritime activity) towards finance and a huge rich-poor gap; 4) geopolitical and military over-reach and hubris; and 5) a massive and precarious growth of debt to maintain national promises and pretenses. You can argue -- and I do -- that the U.S. is on this same track.
The 2006 elections, especially in pivotal states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, produced an electoral repudiation of the GOP's partial fusion with the ideology of the Religous Right that deserves study as we head towards 2008. But I am not at all sanguine that the Republican or Democratic parties and the so-called maintream national media can discuss the five worrisome historical parallels.
Kevin Phillips is a columnist, radio and TV commentator and the author of a dozen books on politics, economics, and history.
