In 2006, Richard Nixon’s data man, Kevin Phillips, published a book that everyone concerned about our national future should read. Its title, American Theocracy, is misleading. Only one of its three sections is about the rise of evangelicals in American politics. The most important and probably least-read section concerns so-called “financialization.” It describes in detail, and with available historical and statistical analysis, how the financialization, in turn, of Holland, Spain and Britain brought their respective globe-spanning empires down from global economic power and influence to their present low-influence senescence.
Holland, Spain and Britain are still around and still mostly democratic. But anyone who thinks the exact same aging process isn’t happening to our nation, just as Phillips predicted but at Trump’s trademark Warp Speed, hasn’t been paying attention.
In his two bestselling books, American Dynasty and Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips established himself as a powerful critic of the political and economic forces that rule—and imperil—the United States, tracing the ever more alarming path of the emerging Republican majority’s rise to power. Now Phillips takes an uncompromising view of the current age of global overreach, fundamentalist religion, diminishing resources, and ballooning debt under the GOP majority. With an eye to the past and a searing vision of the future, Phillips confirms what too many Americans are still unwilling to admit about the depth of our misgovernment.