Just Finished

American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips. An excellent read IMHO. The author used to be a Republican strategist who used to work for Nixon, but has since became critical of the GOP. In this book, he slammed three core constituency of the modern Republican Party: big oil, the Christian Right, and the Financial Services industry.

The third section was the most prescient one. This book was published in 2006, when the DOW was over 13000 points, but the author predicted a catastrophic crisis caused by novel financial instruments like CDOs and CDS's. I wish more people in Washington had read this three years ago, when it might've made a difference.

The middle section about religion was the main reason I bought this book, and it did not disappoint. Phillips described, in painstaking detail, the rise of the radical religious right and what it means to our country. Backed by numbers and graphs on almost every other page, this is by far the most thorough account of this recent chapter of our history.

The part about the dominance of the oil industry was also enlightening. Most of us already knew that US foreign policy in the Middle East was dominated by Big Oil, but most didn't know that the history of this entanglement goes back to the turn of the 20th Century when the British and the French were the ones invading the Middle East.

In each of the three sections Phillips drew analogies between the challenges the US faces today with those faced by former imperial hegemons - Spain, the Netherlands, and Britain. Each of these three powers became successful through early adoption of a new energy source, were weakened as financial activities replaced manufacturing and commerce, and each of these nations turned to a form of religious radicalism as its fortunes decline. Not all of these comparisons were apt, as history doesn't repeat itself perfectly, but there's enough force in these analogy to make me worry. Let's hope that Phillips will write a book about what can be done about these problems.