Kevin Phillips on Bush's Republican party or the emerging Republican minority

Forty years ago, at the dawn of the fledgling right-wing movement, Kevin Phillips was its political commissar. He was that period's Karl Rove. While Richard Viguerie provided the mechanics to build the movement, Phillip's The Emerging Republican Majority provided its ideology. Here's how he describes it:

"I have a personal concern over what has become of the Republican coalition. Forty years ago, I began a book, The Emerging Republican Majority, which I finished in 1967 and took to the 1968 Republican presidential campaign, for which I became the chief political and voting-patterns analyst. Published in 1969, while I was still in the fledgling Nixon administration, the volume was identified by Newsweek as the 'political bible of the Nixon Era.'"

Kevin Phillips no longer considers himself a Republican. Here's why"\:


Oil, debt and God: Three pillars have become central in an unnatural coalition that supports the Republican Party

By Kevin Phillips
(Special to The Washington Post)

"Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

"We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before - in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews.

'Indeed, there is a potent change taking place in this country's domestic and foreign policy, driven by religion's new political prowess and its role in projecting military power in the Mideast.

'The United States has organized much of its military posture since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks around the protection of oil fields, pipelines and sea lanes. But U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has another dimension. In addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the White House is courting end-times theologians and electorates for whom the Holy Lands are a battleground of Christian destiny. Both pursuits - oil and biblical expectations - require a dissimulation in Washington that undercuts the U.S. tradition of commitment to the role of an informed electorate.

'The political corollary - fascinating but appalling - is the recent transformation of the Republican presidential coalition. Since the election of 2000 and especially that of 2004, three pillars have become central: the oil-national security complex, with its pervasive interests; the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and the debt-driven financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street."

{To read the rest of Phillip's article, click here)

Phillips expands on this in his recently published American Theocracy.