Phillips, in American Theocracy, examines the hold that Big Oil, fundamentalism, and debt has on American society and politics. Phillips predicted that American society would falter and the country would be overtaken by others, just as the Roman, Spanish, Dutch, and British empires had collapsed when buffeted by religious fundamentalism, a backward energy technology, and an economy immersed in debt.
How far we have come! Since the Bush years, we have been led by the most secular president in 40 years (if one considers Nixon and Ford more or less non religious), a man more influenced by the liberation theology of Jeremiah Wright than the fervor of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Vice President is a Catholic who mandates anti-Catholic contraceptive policies in Catholic hospitals. The Republican front runner is a Mormon.
Obama gives lip service to green energy policy. He uses the people's money to support companies that produce clean energy, sometimes disastrously (like Solyndra) but has not led the country on a crusade for energy independence or clean energy. Even Jimmy Carter did more. Instead he has opposed the use of mainstream energy workhorses--coal and oil--threatening to make coal too expensive to use and slowing the awarding of licenses for off-shore drilling and stopping the Keystone oil pipeline from Canada. Despite Obama's policies, the nation now exports more energy products than it imports. If we could switch our transportation system to cheap natural gas, we would consider the problem almost solved.
Phillips was most prescient about our national debt, which ballooned under Bush's wars and has exploded at an even faster rate under Obama. Will politicians have the political courage to decrease the debt, supporting some tax increases but mostly imposing draconian spending cuts, especially in Medicare and Defense? That remains to be seen, but it is unlikely under the politicians that exacerbated the problem.
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