Kevin, great thesis. Any ideas on how to counteract these three trends, especially in light of the moribund, timid, compliant opposition put forward by so many leading Democrats?

I haven't read the book yet. I don't think it's available until tomorrow. So I apologize since I imagine I'm asking you to repeat issues you've already addressed in your book.

Tom

I would caution that the relevence of the Religious Right in conjunction with the overall GOP is relatively small.  The primary reason why so many centrists and leftists are concerned over the New Right is not particularly well founded when taking into consideration that the religious and social conservatives continue to dwindle in numbers.  The rub, of course, is that it was the New Right which tipped the even scales in Bush's favor during both the 2000 and 2004 elections.  For his part, Bush has paid these folks only lip service during his 5+ years in the White House.  With the possible exception of the stem cell issue, Bush has not followed through on most of his promises to the New Right and they have begun to grow impatient as a result (which is, in my opinion, a good thing).

The oil debate is interesting.  There is no arguing that the Bush Family has used its influence to strengthen and prolong the industry--just as you point out.  While it would be fortuitous for the oil companies to begin developing alternative forms of energy in earnest, they will certainly not do so when considering their profits are at an all-time high.  One could even argue that in the short term it would not be in the best interest of the American consumer for oil to be phased out.  My guess as to the current state of things are twofold: 1)The Bush Administration (and Pentagon) want to secure as much oil in the next century as is humanly possible.  Whether it be to continue the record profits, keep it out of China's hands, and/or pad the strategic reserves, there are several interesting arguments which support the current strategy.  2)When oil depletion begins in earnest in the next century, the odds are energy and oil companies will be easily able to produce alternative methods when they finally put real money behind research and development.  Despite clever marketing campaigns by the likes of Conoco and BP, only a small percentage of these companies' profits are being allocated toward developing new technologies.

Mr. Phillips,

Your Wealth & Democracy book was just astounding.  I assume this is related, but with the additional problems of oil and religion.  Two questions. 1. Will China ever call our gamble becoming a financier instead of a producer? 2. Do you think the media would ever let the Left get back into the values debate without a focus on abortion, which seems to be the only values debate the media wants to cover? Thanks so much for standing up to these guys.

What Strikes Me

And number 5. Social Darwinism can only take a nation so far. Shoveling all that wealth to the top will eventually slow the whole country down.

Kevin, in your book "The Cousins War" you talk about the deep roots of the dividing lines in American democracy in the different cultural traditions of Britain. The rise of the religious right seems to me just another chapter in this long conflict. I would like to know your thoughts on this.

Re: End Times, the Rapture, etc.

We heard this a little during the Reagan administration and at the time little was made of it. Now, as we see more statistics indicating that a large percentage of Americans actually believe this foolishness, it becomes more frightening. Is there any evidence that people in decision making positions at the White House believe that due to the Second Coming, Rapture, or whatever, there is little need to consider the environment or who is to repay the debt? 

You know, Ann Coulter tends to make me angry because she is just a partisan bomb-thrower.  I wish such people didn't exist.  But as long as the right has 'em, we need 'em too.  So, I don't have much hope for your book as a useful addition to our political discourse, but maybe it will be just the sort of popular book that will either attract and create new liberals or it will help solidify the base. 

With that said, I think you thesis, as presented here, is somewhat flawed.  Oil dependence and debt are obvious problems, and I can't disagree with you there.  But I'm not really concerned about the religious right.  As you note, they are a rather small proportion of the population.  Something like 25%.  Or if you recall the 2004 election exit polls, people who voted on "moral values" made up 22% of those polled.  Exactly how it came to be thought that these voters were the ones who gave the election to Bush is beyond my comprehension.

The thing about the religious right is that they're not going to be around forever.  I believe that in 50 years, when historians look back at this time, it will be recognized as the Fourth American Great Awakening.  This is just something that happens occasionally.  But over time, it will die out.  Some will apostasize, but mostly it won't be transmitted across generations.  Don't misunderstand me--there are more than enough young people among the religious right.  But they're young.  I'm young myself, and I'm largely a pretty happy nihilist.  (Or more accurately, I'm a pragmatist in the original sense of the word--and the one thing I truly believe in is democracy.)

But a lot of people--most people probably--need something to believe in.  And the young are susceptible to believing anything.  The problem is that like battle plans that fail upon meeting the enemy, ideologies do not survive contact with reality.  The religious right will change over time as it's policies fail.  The thing we really ought to think about is the shift in resources in society.  The baby boomers have controlled the bulk of the financial and social resources in our society for the past 20 or 25 years.  When that starts to change, so will our politics.  Here's to the future!

Second, I think you are probably just flat wrong to suggest that democracy in the U.S. might collapse.  The evidence to the contrary seems pretty strong to me.  We are not a new democracy.  We have not just transitioned from authoritarianism.  And we are not threatened with democratic backsliding or regime failure.  

Can you lay out some reasons why you think the Religious Right is such a threat to the United States? 

No book is complete without going into greater depth about the people you analyze from a distance.

For example, give us the employment, family and neighborhood demographics of the religious conservatives in the country you are referring to with your statistics, and then let's examine them carefully for what sort of stake they have in national priorities.

In other words, while you, and many other writers and commentators and urban dainties have the luxuries of study, you have this in part because of the people who tend to the religious, conservative demographic work themselves to the bone to provide you with food on your table.

The hispanic and rural white populations in the South are largely Roman Catholic and protestant, conservative and increasingly GOP.  New immigrants, with a sense of nationalism for America tend not to immediately buy the automatic vilification of the conservative religious life because invariably, part of their experience in obtaining citizenship has been working with and for people who are oriented that way -- i.e. they were sponsored by conservative employers etc.

The GOP panders to all of the country music apple pie stuff written and emotionalized largely by non-veterans of war, and obviously equates criticism of wars with obstructionist non-warriors who don't want the US to succeed in a fight.  They cast them as hecklers of the troops -- and some, are hecklers of the troops.  It's funny about partisans at the extremes -- whether it's Fred Phelps off the right scale or a guy like the blogger who writes here named Hack who says American troops in Iraq are all war criminals -- both parties produce their loudest propaganda with which the other party hits them over the head to get their own recruits in a continual cycle of unrealistic abuse of the entire middle class and the troops and each other.

Unless we understand ourselves and those we are attacking, we won't "progress" at all.  External criticisms that pretend to understand but don't at all go in depth, the kind that categorize, generalize etc. tend to be propaganda, even if you didn't intend it that way.  Ultimately, to tell the whole truth, you have to extensively interview and live in the shoes of the people you're criticizing.  Otherwise, you're plugging for a nice book profit under contract with your publisher for a quick turnout of a book that will get an automatic market among those showing up in the polls as disapproving of Bush.  Now's the time to get that book marketed and out on the shelves for maximum profit, right?

And so goes the partisan goat rope.  The GOP does it through the ad campaigns and pavement beaters in the US Chamber of Commerce, the myriad Insurance lobbies in the states, the tort deform movement and a number of other bullshit three piece suit organizations pushing for corporate energy and defense profits.  Add to that congressmen like Hunter of CA who keep pork rotten defense contracts greased and burning the flesh, i.e. the Osprey project, and you've got a genuine partisan cookout over the flesh and blood of the young men and women volunteers of the services and supporting workers who turn on the spit over the fire of your rhetoric and then learn to repeat it and rehash your gridlock decade after decade.

How did it get this way?  It started with vested interests in various industries fighting with each other over government spending outlays. Liberals tended to align with domestic spending -- they oriented themselves this way because their domestic oriented businesses benefited from such politics.  It was self-interest, not "progressive" thinking.

And then there are the owners.  Owners who don't fight (Halliburton KBR investors for example), owners who don't work beyond managing investments, and owners born to live off of indebting others (there's a sucker born every minute style) and then leeching off of the interest for years . . . sucking the work and individual profits from the middle class via credit cards and amassing more wealth to lend again and again, sucking more and more blood out of them.  And so, those who "own" for a living, owning enough to lend, should be forced to WORK for at least 5 years of hard labor at the lower rungs of some industry so they can actually run among those they live off of and get some empathy for them.  Also, it may be good to deprive them of personal access to their wealth for two to three years so they can truly understand what it is they own and what they're doing unto their fellow Americans.  This way, our corporate leadership will become more MORAL.  Yessir, Mr. Phillips, the solution isn't to throw the religious morals i.e. the Golden Rule out, but to stick to it and instist that it be applied to the owners, the wealthy via public policies that make it so.

Everyone must learn what it is to work hard and live like those who keep them propped up in a higher bracket by doing the grunt work of society that keeps it humming along.  Everyone. 

Reece writes:

I think you are probably just flat wrong to suggest that democracy in the U.S. might collapse. The evidence to the contrary seems pretty strong to me. We are not a new democracy. We have not just transitioned from authoritarianism . And we are not threatened with democratic backsliding or regime failure.

Because we are not a new democracy we must be even more careful to see that we maintain what we have.  Lack of contraints on lobbying, the revolving doors between elected office and lobbying and between the military and the defense industry, the changes over the last couple of decades to campaing financing, and the increasing corporate control of news media all point to our democracy being threatened.

But there is one point I don't hear taked about enough:  turning the military into just another employer by eliminating the draft.  (Although there is a post on TPM Cafe today.)  I don't think a democracy can tolerate that.  It allows us to have a "war" like Iraq in which the general populace does not have a personal stake.  You can be sure our campuses and streets would not be so quiet if everyone of draft age would have to wonder each morning if a draft notice was in the mailbox.

As of 2005-2006, the new chance for the Democrats is to compete for the people in the middle – in particular, merely occasional religious attendees and moderates – who think that the liberals went too far in the 1960s and 1970s but that the Religious Right and the would-be theocrats are the danger now.

 

It interesting that Phillips notes that these voters are not becoming available to the Dems because of GOP overreach on fiscal policy, but rather because of cultural overreach - on issues from Schiavo, to stem-cell research, contraception and "Justice Sunday."

From a first glance it appears that Phillips is suggesting that the Democrats expand the party in the progressive/libertarian direction (as opposed to the populist/communitarian direction argued by Lind and others).  This would seem to suggest that the Democrats should stay the course with Clinton-ere economic policy - fiscal conservatism, free trade, etc.., but aggressively court cultural centrists by pinning the GOP to its hard-right cultural extreme. 

I'm curious to find out how Phillips believes the Dems should do this - to what extent do they need to "distance" themselves from the activists of the cultural left on church-state, gay rights and abortion?  Can the Dems find positions that finesse the gaps between the culutral left and cultural moderates? 

There are two concerns that I have with this analysis.  First, I'm not sure if a center-left cultural party is a majority.  Will the Dems be able to attack cultural moderates without offering a populist economic message?  I'm a bit skeptical.  I happen to think that universal health care is going to draw more votes than deficit reduction. 

Second, its unclear how security policy plays in here.  I think the trends that Phillips notes were largely in play during the 1990s - reflected in the Judis/Texeira homage to Phillips, the Emerging Democratic Majority.  But 9/11 changed the playing field, lurching the country culturally to the right as Bush was able to play off the majority of the public discomfort with Jeffersonian pacifism.  Its unclear to what extent Iraq and the general mess of foreign policy by Bush and the Jacksonians has changed things.  Are we really back to the pre 9/11 dynamic of a county drifting culturally to the left with an increasingly strident and out of touch religious right?  If so, then Democratic Majority is very likely to emerge.

My apologies for the lack of paragraph breaks in the above... I had several but it appears they did not survive the posting.

Anyone else find that pie chart rdf linked to really misleading? Sure, military spending looks a lot bigger if you cut Social Security and so forth out of the picture, but why does it make sense to do that? We pay into both funds at the same time and in the same manner.

If you are right, Gettysburg, why was it so important to get James Dobson's support for Harriet Meiers?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I appreciate that the religious right is peculiar to the United States.  Though many of their desires seems constitent with relgious Jews and Muslims.

 However the dependence on oil and finance to not see special  to the United States.  Europe and Japan get more oil from the Middle East than does the United States.  Part of the strain on the price of oil is that China, India and other former Third World countries are all ever more dependent on oil.  The United States, if anything, is more independent of Middle Eastern oil.  If the whole world is pressed because of the price of oil there is a lot of reason to believe that conservation an altermatives are more not less likely.

The move to finance is also not unique to the United States.  London and Frankfurt are major financing centers.  Computers and medial all make sure that intangible, non-oil needy goods, are the main products of many countries especially the United States.  Exporting based economies like those in Asia definitely own enormous amount of U.S. debt.  For the moment they get paid in dollars so they almost have no choice but to keep recycling the money. It seems unlikely that China and the like will continue to want to be the low cost producer and as they move up the chain who does the manufacturering and who does the financing will change over time.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Kevin:

You could probably have written a similarly persuasive book, titled, "American Technocracy" and bundled it with our dependence on oil and our living beyond our means, i.e. borrowing.  I see similar parallels between our growing dependence on an unsustainable technological system and an interest in pursuing a better life after this life on earth.  What drives all of this is an increasing separation of man from our humble and wild origins. 

Increasingly we are all being drawn into this vortex of a global economic system that shows all signs of an inevitable collapse.  We all share some kind of apocalyptic vision of the future.  The  religious end timers just think that they will be inoculated by their beliefs.  Others, and I would probably put a majority of people in this category, believe that technology is going to save our butts from resource overreach.  I am probably inclined to believe that this techno optimism is equally and perhaps more dangerous than the belief in life after death.  Compounding the problem is globalization itself which, by spreading resources around the world, masks the threat of resource overreach in any particular region where that shortage or other shortages would have tended to keep local populations in check if collapse was somehow averted.   

The Republican/Bush/global capitalist version of this American Theocracy/Technocracy puts the blind stampede on the fast track with no thought of tomorrow.  We fight not for freedom or democracy but the threats against the global technological organism itself that come by way of things that we label as religious fundamentalism, terrorism, provincialism, ethnic strife, etc. but are essentially ways in which the very earth and its more earth centered peoples are rebeling against a system that tells them that this is the only future option available for mankind.  When the fruits of such a system become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands with increasing risks to all dependent on it then we had all better be questioning just what it is that seduces us into this one world future.  What have we "Left Behind"?  Enraptured by the lures of the future, the rapture is merely symbolic of our detachment and separation from our own wild natures and nature itself and our entrapment and imprisonment in this world created solely by man that must inevitably come crashing down.  Pretty biblical and prophetic, no?  A very heavy weight to bear. 

A prejudice against Christians? Are you kidding me? I can't speak for anyone else, but, I have absolutely no problem with Christianity, so long as it doesn't interfere with people's rights. I think everyone has a right to practice their religion, but if they go too far, I'm not going to keep quiet and let them get away with it for triangulation purposes.

If you want to talk about a party that has prejudice against a group of people, let me tell you about these nonsensical anti-gay-marriage amendments that are being passed...