GOP Strategist Kevin Phillips on American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century
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Tuesday, March 21st, 2006
Fmr. GOP Strategist Kevin Phillips on American Theocracy: The Peril and
Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st
Century
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Former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips joins us to discuss his new
book, "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion,
Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century." Throughout the 1970s and
1980s Phillips was viewed as one of the GOP's top theoreticians and
electoral analysts. [includes rush transcript - partial]
As we continue to mark the start of the fourth year of the war in Iraq,
we turn now to Kevin Phillips, the former top Republican strategist.
A generation ago Phillips wrote "The Emerging Republican Majority"
which Newsweek described as the "political bible of the Nixon
administration." Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Phillips was viewed as
one of the GOP's top theoreticians and electoral analysts.
But no more.
Phillips is now warning that the party - and the country as a whole -
is headed for potential disaster. Phillips sums up his concerns in the
title of his new book: "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of
Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century."
A review in Sunday's New York Times said the book may be "the most
alarming analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have
appeared in many years."
The book examines issues ranging from peak oil to the rapture to the
future of the American empire. In a minute we will be joined by Kevin
Phillips here in our Firehouse Studio but first I want to turn to
President Bush. On Monday he spoke about the war in Iraq Renaissance
Cleveland Hotel in Ohio. After his address he took questions from the
crowd. The first question addressed Phillips" book American Theocracy:
Cleveland, Ohio - March 20, 2006:
Q: Thank you for coming to Cleveland, Mr. President, and to the City
Club. My question is that author and former Nixon administration
official Kevin Phillips, in his latest book, American Theocracy,
discusses what has been called radical Christianity and its growing
involvement into government and politics. He makes the point that
members of your administration have reached out to prophetic Christians
who see the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the
apocalypse. Do you believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of
terrorism are signs of the apocalypse? And if not, why not?
THE PRESIDENT: The answer is -- I haven't really thought of it that
way. (Laughter.) Here's how I think of it. The first I've heard of
that, by the way. I guess I'm more of a practical fellow. I vowed after
September the 11th, that I would do everything I could to protect the
American people. And my attitude, of course, was affected by the
attacks. I knew we were at war. I knew that the enemy, obviously, had
to be sophisticated and lethal to fly hijacked airplanes into
facilities that would be killing thousands of people, innocent people,
doing nothing, just sitting there going to work.
We are joined now by Kevin Phillips, longtime Republican strategist and
author of several books. His newest work, "American Theocracy," comes
out today.
Kevin Phillips, author, "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of
Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: In a minute we will be joined by Kevin Phillips here in
our Firehouse studio, but first I want to turn to President Bush. On
Monday, he spoke about the war in Iraq in Ohio. After his address, he
took questions from the crowd. The first question addressed Phillips's
book American Theocracy.
Q: My question is that author and former Nixon administration official
Kevin Phillips, in his latest book, American Theocracy, discusses what
has been called radical Christianity and its growing involvement into
government and politics. He makes the point that members of your
administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war
in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the apocalypse. Do you
believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs
of the apocalypse? And if not, why not?
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The answer is -- I haven't really thought of
it that way. Here's how I think of it. The first I've heard of that, by
the way. I guess I'm more of a practical fellow. I vowed after
September the 11th, that I would do everything I could to protect the
American people. And my attitude, of course, was affected by the
attacks. I knew we were at war. I knew that the enemy, obviously, had
to be sophisticated and lethal to fly hijacked airplanes into
facilities that would be killing thousands of people, innocent people,
doing nothing, just sitting there going to work.
AMY GOODMAN: That was President Bush addressing the Cleveland City Club
in Ohio. Kevin Phillips, longtime Republican strategist, joins us now.
His new book American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical
Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. Welcome to
Democracy Now!
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Happy to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Quite way to launch a book. The President of the United
States questioned about it in the first Q&A at this historic City Club
in Cleveland.
KEVIN PHILLIPS: It's really an appalling thing, because I -- in the
course of the last couple of days, as my book tour started, I've
talked with a number of conservatives, people running conservative
publications, old aides from the Republican campaigns back in the 1960s
and 1970s, and everybody agrees, and some are even starting to say it
semi-publicly: this man is a national embarrassment.
AMY GOODMAN: Conservatives?
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Conservatives.
AMY GOODMAN: On what grounds?
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, some just because they know him and don't think
anybody with his lack of qualifications should be president, others
that think that the country has a black eye, others that think that
conservatism is now being threatened as much as liberalism was in the
late 1960s by the Johnson administration. This is just a convergence of
the ineptitude of one man, of the complicity of a number of other
senior people in the administration -- I don't know their exact motives
-- and a horrible situation for the Pentagon, because the Pentagon
realizes that the American soldiery in Iraq is being brutalized in a
way that then casts disrespect on the American army, that interferes
with recruitment. I, two years ago, gave a talk near Fort Bragg in
North Carolina, and already dozens of people from the military were
saying that this was going to be a black eye. And it's worse than a
black eye. And you really have to say, and I have to say, that Bush and
Cheney and Rumsfeld, if we had a parliamentary system, they would be
there before the bar of the Congress, having to defend this. And that's
where they should be.
AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Phillips, you talk about radical religion, about
debt, and about oil, about this being an oil war. You also talk about
peak oil. That's not talked about very much in the mainstream. Explain.
KEVIN PHILLIPS: The peak oil idea is that just as the United States oil
production peaked in 1971, that we have a limited amount of oil
globally, and that it's something that can't be re-created. It's
running out. And the expectation of some is that the oil production of
the non-OPEC countries will peak at some point during the 2010s, and
that then the production of OPEC itself will peak in the 2020s or
2030s. Now, some people think that Saudi production has already peaked.
Now, if you believe this, and it's possible, then we face an enormous
convergence, again under specific oil-related circumstances, of a
global struggle for natural resources as the price of oil climbs, as we
turn the armed services into a global oil protection service, which has
been happening, and as we see the administration refuse to grapple with
the need to really curb oil consumption in the United States, which is
mostly through transportation and especially motor vehicles.
And I just have a sense, as many others on the conservative side do,
this administration has no strategy to deal with these converging
problems, be they foreign policy, military, oil, debt. They are like
the three little monkeys on the old jade thing - the one sees no
evil, one speaks no evil, and one hears no evil. Do they know anything?
You know, that's an open question.
AMY GOODMAN: We see in Washington an oiligarchy. I mean, you have
President Bush, who is a failed oil man himself; Cheney, former head of
the largest oil services corporation in the world, Halliburton;
Condoleezza Rice was on the board of Chevron for more than a decade.
And you can go on from there. But what is the significance of this for
this country and the world?
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, what I would like to do is broaden that, because
you're absolutely right, and the Republicans are the principal
vehicle of this. But they are by no means the only vehicle, when Lloyd
Bentsen was the Vice Presidential nominee for the Democrats. He was
somebody very closely connected to the oil industry. It turns out that
Al Gore's father was closely connected to the oil industry, and he
continued the relationship with Armand Hammer of Occidental, and as a
result, David Ignatius of the Washington Post wrote a big piece back
several years ago saying we really had almost everybody in the 2000
election was oil-connected. It wasn't just the two Republicans. It
was Al Gore, too.
It is such a power center in the United States, especially now that the
South and Sunbelt have become most important, because that's where the
bulk of the oil is, that they're into both parties, enormously
powerful in Congress. There is an oil and petroleum culture in the
United States that extends back 150-200 years into probably half of our
states. This is no criminal conspiracy or anything. This is just a
major resource, having evolved as something that's part and parcel of
the American economy and American supremacy. And you can't just wish
it away. It's a vested interest of the first order.
AMY GOODMAN: The war in Iraq was over oil?
KEVIN PHILLIPS: I think it was principally over oil. If you - and let
me qualify that by saying I think a certain amount of the reason for
the war in Iraq was a larger geo-strategic situation in which we were
going to have to leave Saudi Arabia. And the way to develop an
alternative oil supply and base was to aim at Iraq. Now, that went
beyond purely oil as a consideration.
Another facet of the invasion of Iraq, in 2002, George W. Bush gave a
speech in Texas, in which he talked about how Saddam Hussein had tried
to assassinate his father. So there you have sort of the family aspect.
And lastly, the Middle East is a battleground of biblical Armageddon
and everything. And that's swimming into play. A number of the
religious right people talked about Saddam Hussein as the anti-Christ,
and the Left Behind series, which is the Tim LaHaye 60 million sold
context of the end times and Armageddon, while the Antichrist comes
from New Babylon and Iraq, and the attempt was to portray Baghdad,
Babylon, as the focal point of the end times, so that a whole lot of
supporters of the administration, they didn't care about weapons of
mass destruction. This was part of the unfolding biblical epic of the
end times and the war between good and evil. And this is something that
I get into in the book; it's hard to explain it just in a short
conversation.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we've got some time.
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, this is very central to the whole Republican
constituency. What you've got is that 45% of American Christians
believe in Armageddon, and the more religious ones, the fundamentalists
and evangelicals more than anybody else. So, my assumption is that the
Bush electorate is probably 50 to 55% people who believe in Armageddon
and probably more or less the same numbers who believe that the
Antichrist is already on earth. And when you have this backdrop and you
have a president who got his start in national politics as his
father's liaison with the religious right back in 1987 and '88, you
just have an enormous exposure to this whole psychological context and
an awareness on the part of people in the White House that this huge
constituency interprets the Middle East in this very unusual way.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, let's go back to Reagan's time. And, of course,
Reagan's vice president was George Bush, Sr. He also embraced
evangelicals; for example, I mean, in Central America, Rios Montt in
Guatemala. What's the difference now?
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, there's an enormous difference, because Ronald
Reagan was in many ways an easygoing guy. He could make a reference to
Armageddon. He could pursue a rightwing type of politics like you're
describing. But, personally, he wasn't all that intense, shall we say?
I mean, here was a man who was the first divorced president in American
history, married to two different Hollywood actresses. He was not the
incarnation of a religious right political outlook. Bush is.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet the right embraced him.
KEVIN PHILLIPS: The right embraced him, because that was at point in
time -- and here I go back more to my Republican antecedents -- where,
in my opinion, during the 1960s and 1970s, the left had pushed much too
hard against religion in an attempt to create a more secular society.
And this just grossly mis-underestimated the role that religion plays
in the United States, and it created this huge backlash. So the balance
was beginning to be restored in the 1980s, and now the pendulum has
swung, so the abuse is on the part of the religious right, the people
who were complaining about being abused 30 or 40 years ago.
AMY GOODMAN: So, explain where George Bush fits into this picture,
George W. Bush, his own religion, how he embraces the right -- the
religious right.
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Let me pretend that we're talking about painting in
French impressionism, and I'm going to give you four or five
impressionist scenes. We can't do this very academically. Back in
1999 and 2000, as George W. was preparing to run, it's been reported
or acknowledged that he told three or four different groups of
preachers, conservative organizations, that he felt that God had called
him to run for president. Well, he gets in the White House, and he's
not doing terribly well, but 9/11 comes along, and this is a massive
revitalization of his politics in the sense of a chance to create a
conflict between good and evil and, in essence, rally his flock. And at
that point in time, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reported he did
a survey of religious right leaders, and they agreed that God had
chosen Bush for this moment. And he concluded the piece for the Post by
saying this was the first time in history that the leader of the
religious right nationally was the President of the United States. And
I believe that's how they felt.
And then we go -- more impressionist paintings on the wall here -- we
go to reports from the Middle East. This came in several Israeli
newspapers and others, that Bush at one point commented, although the
White House denies it, that he said God told him to invade Afghanistan,
God told him to invade Iraq. And then we get 2004, and when he was
campaigning in several places, again he played the religious card. And
the Lancaster New Era in Pennsylvania, the Old Order Amish country,
reported that Bush talked to a group of Amish, the Plain People, and he
said that he trusted that God spoke through him, and if that weren't
true he wouldn't be able to do his job. Now, they reported this
conversation, but their reporter had not been there, so he couldn't
substantiate it.
But this thread -- and I come back to my impressionism -- from a whole
lot of people, many of them Republicans and people acquainted with the
Republican Party -- this has been in there -- it's this sense that he
is the prophet and he's telling us what God wants. And this, to me, is
an enormously important backdrop to this mess in what is, after all,
the Bible lands for Christians, the Middle East.
AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Kevin Phillips, a former Republican
strategist. His latest book is called American Theocracy: The Peril and
Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st
Century. We'll be back with him in a minute.
[break]
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