Theocracy or Death by Logorrhea?

Jacob Weisberg deconstructs Kevin Philipps and his latest book:

Phillips' faults are on full, gaseous display in his latest jeremiad, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. The book was No. 1 on Amazon before being released and has already been widely praised by liberals, who continue to welcome Phillips as a fresh convert to their side decades after his defection from the right. Alan Brinkley, a distinguished historian who should know better, last week praised American Theocracy in the lead essay of the New York Times Book Review as "frighteningly persuasive" and "a harrowing picture of national danger … that none should ignore." Time calls the book "indispensable."

Any book hailed by the NYT and Time should obviously be regarded as skewed toward Happy Horses*** right out of the starting gate. I must confess that I enjoyed Philipps book on The Cousins' Wars, but regard his patrician and olympian condescension as a bit annoying. Weisberg finds them dizzyingly disconcerting and conducive to massive overstatement.

Let me help dispense with it. Phillips' argument is that oil dependency, Christian fundamentalism, and excessive debt are destroying the country. He is not wrong that these are dangers. But he wildly misunderstands, distorts, and overstates all of them.

Weisberg's forte is financial and he co-wrote a book with Robert Rubin, Clinton's adept Treasury Secretary. Weisberg also has this very column in a pay-to-view mode in the Financial Times tomorrow. Finally, he is a senior editor of Slate. He is finally a very trenchant critic of foibles on the left, far more so than party-line hacks in the MSM who thunder along with the herd instinctively toward the left. After comparing Philipps with Michael Moore without the satirical gift, he dismisses the KP theses on oil and theocracy in a paragraph apiece, saving his choicest scorn for Philipps' attitude toward high finance and economics in general:

When it comes to economics, Phillips has still less of a clue. The tip-off that he doesn't know what he's talking about comes in the section about oil, when he tries to explain that not all "proven" reserves are available. Drilling may become uneconomic, Phillips notes, if more energy is required to find and extract a barrel of oil than the barrel contains—"at least until the price of oil rises." Sorry, but if it costs more than a barrel of oil to make a barrel of oil, a higher price won't help.

This sort of comment at least prepares us for the obtuseness that follows. Phillips is surely right, if impressively unoriginal, to argue that too much debt is a bad thing. But why must it mean that America is headed the way of Rome? Reagan ran larger deficits in GDP terms than Bush has done, but a more fiscally prudent successor reversed them. Phillips' declinism relies on fatuous anti-market prejudices familiar from his earlier work: that a healthy economy must be based in manufacturing, that free trade and globalization impoverish us, that foreign ownership is treacherous, that industrial policy works, and that a robust financial sector means trouble.

The hostility to Wall Street implicit in the last notion is part and parcel of a condescending, aristo-populism that recalls Gore Vidal without the twinkle. In the Phillips worldview, plutocrats exploit the American proletariat, which supports the policies that keep it miserable out of false consciousness—the poor hicks actually believe Christ is coming to save them. But any potential Marxist rigor swiftly dissipates into a haze of Syriana—paranoia about the Bush dynasty and the CIA, Skull and Bones, the House of Saud, and the discredited October Surprise conspiracy. Have I mentioned that Phillips is an appalling writer? His prose is clich?-ridden, self-referential, maddeningly repetitive, and dull enough to kill weeds.

Once upon a time, Kevin Phillips crunched a lot of numbers to give shrewd, if cynical, political advice to Republicans about capitalizing on white fear of black people. Since switching sides, he has proposed various ways for the liberals to knock down the conservative majority he helped to build. Democrats would be wise to beware of geeks bearing such gifts.

Somewhere Weisberg calls Philipps' penchant for diatribes against the right as "Gore Vidal without the twinkle." Expect Philipps to be on every talking head show from now to Easter/Passover droning sagely about his latest Chicken Little thesis.