When Wingnuts Repent

I'm of two minds regarding those few-and-far-between conservatives who helped to architect the nightmare in which we find ourselves today and later repented and realized the error of their ways. On the one hand, better late than never, and some of them are really making an effort to undo the damage they created. On the other hand, if it weren't for people like this, we might not be in this mess.

One of the people about whom I'm ambivalent is David Brock. Yes, Brock is now running Media Matters, which is doing yeoman's work in exposing the hypocrisy of the right-wing media. But it's hard to forget that it was Brock's association with The Arkansas Project which led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and indirectly to the reluctance among Democrats today to push for impeachment of a president whose flagrant violations of the Constitution really DO constitute high crimes and misdemeanors.

Going back even further, we have Kevin Phillips, an ex-Nixonite whose 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority foresaw the emergence of the conservative south. Phillips started to repent of his ways as early as 1990, when in The Politics of Rich and Poor, he decried the tilted-toward-the-rich Reagan tax cuts. More recently, he blasted the crony culture of the Bush family in American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush.

Now, Phillips is opining again, and his opinion (one which alas I share) is that We. Are. Doomed.

Michelle Goldberg reviews Phillips' new book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century in Salon today:

The title is a bit misleading, because only the middle section of the book, which is divided into thirds, deals with the religious right. The first part, "Oil and American Supremacy," is about America's prospects as oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, and the last third, "Borrowed Prosperity," is about America's unsustainable debt. Phillips' argument is that imperial overstretch, dependence on obsolete energy technologies, intolerant and irrational religious fervor, and crushing debt have led to the fall of previous great powers, and will likely lead to the fall of this one. It reads, in some ways, like a follow-up to "The March of Folly."

"Conservative true believers will scoff: the United States is sue generis, they say, a unique and chosen nation," writes Phillips. "What did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that He was apparently not added a further debilitating note to the later stages of each national decline."

[snip]

To tell the story of the impending end of American supremacy, Phillips ranges through history and across subjects, going into detail about seemingly tangential matters like the production of whale oil in 17th century Holland. It can be a slog -- Phillips is sometimes a dry writer who builds his arguments by slapping down numbers and statistics like a bricklayer. (At least he's self-aware -- at one point in his section on religion, he notes, "By this point the reader may feel baptized by statistical and denominational total immersion.") Much of what he writes in individual chapters has been covered elsewhere in numerous books about peak oil, the religious right and economic profligacy.

But Phillips' book is very valuable in the way he brings all the strands together and puts them in context. He has a history of good judgment that affords him the authority to make big-picture claims: In 1993, the New York Times Book Review wrote of him, "through more than 25 years of analysis and predictions, nobody has been as transcendentally right about the outlines of American political change as Kevin Phillips." Other recent books foresee American meltdown; James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency" deals with some of the same gathering threats as "American Theocracy." Kunstler is a far more engaging writer than Phillips, but he's also more prone to doomsday speculation, and he sometimes seems to relish the apocalyptic scenario he conjures. It's Phillips' sobriety and gravitas that gives "American Theocracy" ballast, and that makes it frightening.

[snip]

The first section, "Oil and American Supremacy," covers the history of oil in American politics, both foreign and domestic, and what it means for America when oil starts running out. The subject of peak oil has been extensively covered elsewhere, yet it remains on the fringes of much of the political debate in America, despite its massive implications. Essentially, peak oil is the point at which more than half the earth's available oil has been extracted. "After this stage, getting each barrel out requires more pressure, more expense, or both," writes Phillips. "After a while, despite nominal reserves that may be considerable, more energy is required to find and extract a barrel of oil than the barrel itself contains." Before that point comes, scarcity will drive prices to unheard-of levels. If that happens, the entire American way of life -- the car culture, agribusiness, frequent air travel -- will become untenable.

Experts differ about when we might pass the peak, but as Phillips notes, "even relative optimists see it only two or three decades away." Unfortunately, the United States is uniquely unable to grapple with the mere idea of life after cheap gasoline, because the country's entire sprawling infrastructure was built on the assumption that oil would remain plentiful. Writes Phillips, "[B]ecause the twenty-first-century United States has a pervasive oil and gas culture from its own earlier zenith -- with an intact cultural and psychological infrastructure -- it's no surprise that Americans cling to and defend an ingrained fuel habit …The hardening of old attitudes and reaffirmation of the consumption ethic since those years may signal an inability to turn back."

The end of previous empires, Phillips explains, also corresponded with the obsolescence of their dominant energy source. The Netherlands was the "the wind and water hegemon" from 1590 to the 1720s. In the mid-18th century, Britain, harnessing the newly discovered power of coal, became the leading world power, only to be left behind by oil-fueled America. "The evidence is that leading world economic powers, after an energy golden era, lose their magic -- and not by accident," he writes. "The infrastructures created by these unusual, even quirky, successes eventually became economic obstacle courses and inertia-bound burdens."

"American Theocracy's" middle section deals with religion. Once again, the book's value lies not in any new revelations -- Phillips mostly relies on the work of other reporters and analysts -- but in the context provided. In his sweeping overview, he misses some subtleties. He writes, for example, "Opponents of evolution -- successful so far in parts of the South -- are indeed busy trying to ban the teaching of it and textbooks that support it in many northern conservative or politically divided areas." That's not quite true -- Darwin's foes might dream of the day when he's expunged from the schools, but right now, their focus is on having creationism or "intelligent design" taught alongside evolution, not in place of it.

That's a relatively small point, but it's indicative of the rather cursory treatment Phillips gives to the dynamics of the movement he decries. He's much more interested in what it portends -- a kind of soft theocracy that itself is an indication of an empire in decline. What he's talking about is not a Christian version of Iran, but a country ruled by an evangelical party whose electoral machinery is integrated into a network of fundamentalist churches.

[snip]

Looking at the possible crises facing the country, Phillips writes of the "potential for an incendiary convergence if -- a big if, to be sure -- several of the worry-wart camps prove to be correct … I can't remember anything like this multiplicity of reasonably serious calculations and warnings. It is as if the United States, like the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes's 'One-Hoss Shay,' is about to lose all its wheels at once."

For someone who is profoundly uneasy about America's future right now, there's something perversely comforting about reading this from a figure like Phillips. It suggests that one's enveloping sense of foreboding is based on something more than the psychological stress of living under the Bush kakistocracy. A feeling that the world is falling apart is usually associated with neurosis; now, it's possible that it's a sign of sanity.

But if Phillips is correct, the coming years are going to be ugly for all of us, not just blithe exurbanites with SUVs and floating-rate mortgages. With oil growing scarce and America unable or unwilling to even begin weaning itself away, we could see a future of resource wars that would inflame jihadi terrorism and bankrupt the country, shredding what's left of the social safety net. As Phillips notes, a collapsed economy would leave many debt-ridden Americans as what Democratic leaders have called "modern-day indentured servants," paying back constantly compounding debt with no hope of escape via bankruptcy. The prospect of social breakdown looms. The desperation of New Orleans could end up being a preview.

Desperate economic times are not good for democracy. The Great Depression, which ushered in the New Deal, was an anomaly in this regard. In an Atlantic Monthly article published last summer, the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman wrote, "American history includes several episodes in which stagnating or declining incomes over an extended period have undermined the nation's tolerance and threatened citizens' freedoms." During the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s, when tens of thousands of families lost their land due to a combination of rising interest rates and falling crop prices, the Posse Comitatus, a far-right paramilitary network, made exceptional recruiting inroads. One poll had more than a quarter of Farm Belt respondents blaming "International Jewish bankers" for their region's woes.

The right's ideological infrastructure has only grown stronger since then. Kunstler may not have been exaggerating when he told Salon, "Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlements to a McHouse and a McCar."

Eventually, like Spain, England and the Netherlands, the United States, shorn of imperial fantasy, may evolve into something better than what it is today. But terrible times seem likely to come first -- years of fuel shortages, foreign aggression, millenarian madness and political demagoguery. A Democratic president could stop exacerbating the country's problems and could reconcile with the rest of the world, but it's unclear how much he or she could really turn things around. America's economic and energy foundations are too badly eroded to be restored anytime soon. Besides, redistricting and the overrepresentation of rural states in the Senate mean that the GOP will remain powerful even if a decisive majority of Americans vote against it. Zealous conservatives in Congress and the media will almost certainly mount an assault on any future Democratic president just as they did on Bill Clinton. Governmental deadlock, as opposed to flagrant recklessness and misrule, is probably the best that can be hoped for, at least for the next few years.

Now, I happen to think Phillips is right, that we are on the verge of the kind of bad times that may make the Great Depression look like the 1990's. But Phillips seems unaware of the role he, and other pundits like him who became enamored of the "I got mine and fuck you" doctrine of the Republican Party that has existed since the Nixon era, have played in getting us to where we are now. David Brock begat the obsession with Bill Clinton's sex life, and Kevin Phillips begat Ronald Reagan.

And so here we are today, on the verge of collapse, while a new generation of pundits at the National Review and World Nut Daily think that when the oil runs out and the oceans rise, they will somehow be immune from the effects because they are loyal soldiers in the Army of Captain Codpiece.