A gathering threat to America's future
Kevin Phillips writes provocatively in today's Washington Post on how the GOP—'the first religious party in U.S. history'—is leading America toward a theocracy.
According to Phillips the development of a theocracy can be seen in the emergence of several conditions: a ruler who claims to speak for God, a ruling party controlled by religious believers, the establishment of religion as the ruling authority in government, and a public and foreign policy guided by sacred scripture.
Theocracy's emergence in twenty-first century America is rooted in three central pillars: '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.'
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.
Phillips highlights the extreme danger posed by the recent takeover of the GOP by religious fundamentalists:
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.
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...
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.
A conservative himself and former Nixon campaign chief political analyst, Phillips sees in the current ruling coalition a 'fatal convergence' of 'preeminent weaknesses' typical of the decline of other great world powers such as Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic and Britain: religious excess, a declining energy and industrial base, and massive debt linked to foreign and military overstretch.
He has a book out on all this and more, entitled American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.