Kevin Phillips’American Theocracy: A Study of Late Stage US Capitalism

Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century is a stunning political and intellectual achievement. In several respects it is courageous; given that Kevin Phillips almost thirty-five years ago began his career as a Republican strategist. It is not without flaws, especially in Phillips’ understanding of race, slavery and colonialism in the creation of capitalism and the role they play in its current crises. These matters will be dealt with later in this essay. Put succinctly, however, this book is an examination of late American capitalism.

The basic thesis of the book is that America is in the throes of several converging crises: a crisis of ideology, manifested in the rise of Christian and, to a lesser extent, Jewish fundamentalism, and their becoming a significant part of the ideology of the state and the Republican Party; a crisis of oil dependency, which is deepened as the world’s supply of oil peaks; and a crisis of debt, manifested in historically unprecedented levels of private, business, government and foreign indebtedness. Phillips argues that the George W. Bush presidency is at the center of these converging crises. It is entangled in oil and debt capitalism and is deeply implicated in the rightwing Evangelical ideological movement. Due to these entanglements it can only deepen these crises. Phillips does not suggest that a Hillary Clinton or John Kerry presidency would make a significant difference. He argues that the GOP government in Washington is a southern-dominated, biblically driven rogue coalition, like the southern slavocracy before Lincoln’s election.

Phillips sees the current crises as symptomatic of national decline. They transcend the Bush presidency; they are systemic, meaning they manifest a crisis of American capitalism. These symptoms were present in almost exact form in past capitalist hegemons, i.e. Spain in the 17th century, the Netherlands in the 18th century and Britain in the late 19th and early 20th century. Each of these nations were imperial empires. Each, like the US, experienced imperial overreach and imperial hubris.

His examination is at once historical, examining long trajectories of national development and decline; systemic, rooted in economic and political analysis; and ideological, wherein he asserts the active role of ideology, in particular fundamentalist Christianity, in the shaping of the contemporary American state and foreign policy. The focus on systemic crises in American capitalism makes this work, even if unintended, a radical critique of American capitalism. The book is divided into three parts: oil, radical religion and debt. Each is a specific study of an aspect of 21st century American capitalism.

Foreign Oil and American Capitalism

He begins with oil. This beginning is particularly timely as oil per barrel topped $75.00 with the prospect of its reaching $100.00 not far off. The narrative starts in the mid 1970’s when US oil reserves peaked, several Middle East oil producers (Iraq, Libya and Iran) nationalized Western oil interests and when OPEC’s size and influence over global oil markets increased. Phillips observes:

Since the 1970’s US foreign policy has been disproportionately driven by oil and the overarching need to insure that foreign oil flows uninterruptedly to the US. Connected to an oil driven foreign policy were the aims to block Soviet (perhaps now Chinese) access to the Persian Gulf, maintain the House of Saud in power in Saudi Arabia and insure that OPEC uphold the dollar as the currency through which oil is traded. This last assures the recycling of petrodollars (dollars accumulated in oil producing nations’ central banks) to purchase US treasury bonds and weapons systems.

Iraq and the Hundred Years Oil Wars

Phillips argues that the US has been in a thirty years oil war. The two Iraq wars, 1991 and 2003, are its decisive events. Iraq is strategic in completing three interrelated parts of US 21st century oil policies. They are “rebuilding of Anglo-American oil reserves, transformation of Iraq into an oil protectorate-cum-military base, and reinforcement of the global hegemony of the US dollar.” Iraq’s place was heightened by the 1990’s when it was suspected that Iraq might have more oil reserves left than Saudi Arabia. The Middle East and oil have fueled a hundred years war, pitting British, German, American, French, Russian, Israeli and Arab interests against one another and in fleeting coalitions against one or another combination of the players. Iraq’s central place in the hundred years struggle to control Middle East oil goes back to the pre World War I proposal by the Germans to build a Berlin to Baghdad railway as a way to connect Mesopotamian oil fields to German industry and its war machine.

By the 1990’s sharp and, it seems, enduring conflicts and contradictions over oil had emerged. On the one side American imperialism’s drive to achieve hegemony and on the other the French, Russian, German and Chinese efforts to get access to Iraqi oil. In this mix China has emerged as a critical competitor to the US. For instance, in April 2006 following his visit to Washington President Hu of China flew directly to Saudi Arabia and China and Saudi Arabia signed mutual defense and economic cooperation treaties. On the other hand, in 2001 Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy Development Group linked foreign oil needs and national security and the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields. Phillips points out that these policies of containing Iraq in order to control access to its oil fields goes back to the Clinton Administration. Clinton signed off on air strikes against Iraq in January and June 1996 and deployed troops on Iraq’s borders in 1997-98 after Baghdad proposed oil concessions to Russia, China and France. The Bush-Cheney Administration continued Clinton’s policies, upping them to include full scale war and an energy forward strategy which was based on hamstringing Iraq with respect to negotiations with China, Russia and France. As this policy played out US foreign policy became militarized. At the same time the Bush Administration began negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan to accept the construction of an American pipeline from Turkmenistan (a former Soviet Republic) through Kabul to Karachi, Pakistan. Phillips suggests that the US military has become a global oil protection service and the war on terrorism is being conflated with wars for oil.

Africa’s Oil and Global Resource Wars

When all the pieces are put together the wars on terrorism and the Iraq wars are what Michael Klare claims are resource wars, where oil is not a mere commodity, but a matter of national security. In this scenario resource wars could extend beyond the Middle East to Russia, China, Africa and Latin America, especially Venezuela. There have, however, been counter moves by China and Russia, a significant example being the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, established to blunt the imperial overreach of the US in South Asia. Beijing’s aggressive challenges to American trade hegemony is expressed in what Joshua Cooper Ramo calls the Beijing Consensus (China’s counter to the neoliberal globalist policies of Washington), another global counter move to contain the US militarily and economically.

Under the cloak of fighting terrorism, talks have begun between Washington and several African nations to build permanent naval and military bases in West Africa, particularly Senegal, Ghana and Mali – a rising oil region. The Wall Street Journal indicates that the key mission for US forces in Africa is to guarantee that Nigerian oilfields, that in the future could account for 25% of all US imports, remain secure. US military officials have visited Gabon and Sao Tome where they are considering building a deepwater port. The US European Command has recently stated its carrier battle groups would spend half their time going down the west coast of Africa. The US oil strategy in Africa has ignited ethnic conflict, corruption, wealth and income disparities and interstate tensions. Sudan and Chad and the political and ethnic struggles in Nigeria are case studies of these developments.

Right Wing Christianity: Oil, Race and the State

While the transition is not neat, Phillips moves to rightwing religion as the second stool in the crisis scenario. He perceives America’s deep religious, ideological and cultural divisions as forms of warfare, specifically ideological civil war. These divisions are motor forces of American politics and history. This thesis originates with his book The Cousins Wars. He traces the current religio-ideological conflicts and divisions among whites (when Phillips talks about America, he is talking about white America almost exclusively) to the Civil War and Reconstruction. The late 20th century rise of right wing fundamentalist Christianity based in the ideas of biblical inerrancy, the end of time theological mythology, the idea that white Americans are a chosen people, war, including nuclear war, in the Middle East to signify the return of the Messiah, and creationism and intelligent design as a substitute for science, is part of the Southification of the nation and American religion.

The national divisions over Christianity are really division about race first, and then gender relations, war and peace, science and ultimately the shape of 21st century capitalism. Phillips easily acknowledges how religion plays into all of the issues of division; his problem is to account for how race is factored in. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, opposed the Civil Rights Movement, was and is a center of white resentment against Blacks and more recently gays, lesbians and transgendered people. While accurately understanding the religio-ideological form of the divisions among whites, Phillips fails to acknowledge the substance of these divisions in race and racial inequality.

He conceptualizes the South as more than a region; it is, he tells us, a culture and an ideology. In this respect he speaks of a greater South, which reaches beyond the old Confederacy and its border states. The main institutional mechanism for the Southification of the nation is the Southern Baptist Convention and more recently, the Republican Party. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) became the “nurseries of American fundamentalism.” Southern Baptists, during the long period of the Cold War, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the anti-Vietnam War Movement, the Women’s Movement and the Gay and Lesbian Movement, defined themselves as representatives of the white majority and of cultural and ideological normativity. Their goal was not to reject society, but to absorb it. Under the leadership of the SBC, Baptists linked Christianity to American patriotism and support for all wars and for huge military spending. Normalcy was associated most strikingly with some form of Southern white culture. Ultimately, they viewed themselves as the nation.

New White Ethnic, Religious and Ideological Identities

Out of the Southification of a large part of the nation new ethno-religio-ideological identities have formed. White fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity (Black hangers-on not withstanding) is an identity within the white population. It makes up about 40% of the white population and 60% of the Republican coalition. They view themselves as authentically American and authentically white. They are the political and ideological underpinnings of right wing authoritarianism, and I would insist, crypto-fascism. This coalition, Phillips observes, is driven by “the South’s haunted history, regional religion and combative temperament.” Moreover, “the twenty-first century Greater South commands a much bigger share of the nation’s population and resources then did the ill-fated Confederate States.” In politics this produces religious excess, attacks upon science and plans for global war and crusaderism. To stay in power the Republican Party after Ronald Reagan was transformed into a reservoir of fealty to whiteness, manifested as white Southern folk culture and white resentment to blackness. George Wallace, segregationist Governor of Alabama, in the 1968 and 1972 Presidential elections, first demonstrated this combination as a potent national political force.