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• Mr. Phillips' blog
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• American Theocracy

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Tavis: Kevin Phillips is a former Republican strategist turned political analyst and best-selling author. A generation ago, his book 'The Emerging Republican Majority' spelled out the blueprint for what would become the southern realignment of the GOP. His current best-seller, however, is a scathing critique of today's Republican majority. The book is called "American Theocracy, The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, And Borrowed Money in the Twenty-First Century.' Kevin Phillips, nice to have you on the program.

Kevin Phillips: Nice to be here.

Tavis: Let me start our conversation, if I can, with a clip that doest really need much setting up. It's the President speaking at a farm in Cleveland. Roll the clip.

Tavis: Mr. Phillips, again, nice to have you on the program. (Laugh) What, first of all, as an author, you couldn't pay (laugh) for that kind of publicity. Somebody standing up, and obviously, it speaks to what the text has done. It's generated a conversation in this country, it's on the 'New York Times' best-seller list. You got the President being asked about what you write in this text. What did you make of the question, and of his response?

Phillips: Well, the question took him by surprise, and you can't fault him for that. But what people don't realize without being told is he was speaking about this for four and a half minutes, and he said nothing. And his first reaction was to just look for a joke, and, and I think that's understandable. But why he couldn't break this off more quickly amazes me.

And I think the answer is that a large chunk of the Republican Presidential Coalition that he represents believes very much in the apocalypse and the end times, and all of this. And another very significant percentage of his coalition would be flabbergasted (laugh) to hear him say he thinks anything like that. So he's sort of between the Devil and the deep blue sea, and he didn't do a very good job of swimming in either direction.

Tavis: Let me ask you to go a little further for me, if you might. Why, to your point, should he have been able to, to, to, to make mincemeat of this question?

Phillips: Well, he should have known that he has to straddle. Because roughly 45 percent of American Christians believe, according to a poll, in Armageddon and the end times. And among his constituency, it's probably as high as 55 percent. So he has to be aware of these people. He has to know that he has to juggle this sort of thing, and he should have had an idea in his mind of how to deal with it.

Not necessarily at that moment, though, which is why I can feel a little sorry for him. But I don't basically think he's wrapped his thought process around exactly the sort of straddle that he's undertaking in the Middle East.

Tavis: Tell me about this title and how you chose it, "American Theocracy.'

Phillips: Well, American theocracy would mean a rule by religion, and someone can fairly say that while there's a trend in that direction, it's an overstatement to say that it's happened already. And the point would be that if we go back and we think about theocracies that we learned about in history classes, they were generally very small places, whether it was John Kelvin's Geneva or Massachusetts Bay under the Puritans.

When you get a big country with 300 million people, you don't get the same pattern. And it's very easy to lay out five or six things that show the huge change in American politics in the direction of politics and religion coming a lot closer together, which is the reason for the concern.

Tavis: If I could make up a phrase here, and I wanna get to this in a second, this book, as I read it, creates a theocratic triangle. You make three arguments here at the core of this book. I wanna get to those in just a second. Before I do, though, one of the arguments you make in this book, and I've heard you make before, is that the Republican Party, the President's party, really is the first religious party in this country. Explain.

Phillips: Well, this has been an idea simmering among the academicians really for more than a decade. And the yardstick that they use is that it's now clear, and it started to be clear in 1988 and 1992, that religious people, high frequency church or religious services attendees, have a much higher ratio of supporting Republicans than the average person.

And down at the bottom of the ladder, people who almost never go to church or have secular beliefs would be the most lopsidedly Democratic. It doesn't make much difference what religion it is, basically. It's the true believers, the people who are very concerned about religion, be they Protestants, Catholics, or Jews, have a much greater Republican set of loyalties, because they are religious people. And that we haven't had before in this country.

Tavis: All right, so back to this notion, my notion of this theocratic triangle that you build to make the case of this book, "American Theocracy.' Three arguments you make that have allowed this, created this phenomenon that we are now part of, like it or loathe it. The first is oil dependence. Take it away.

Phillips: Oil dependence is a real problem for the United States because we now produce only about 35 to 40 percent of the oil we need. This country basically grew during the twentieth century as the great power that had the oil that won the wars. As the great power that had the oil that put our manufacturing ahead of everything else.

And we were able, basically, to spread out across the 50 states and to build interstates, and to have people live 70 miles outside of where they worked. That's not gonna work anymore. We can't afford to buy all this foreign oil, and if we don't control the oil spigots, the United States is not gonna be the power that it used to be.

It's that dependent on oil, and our arrival on the stage as the leading power in the world was so closely connected to oil, if we don't have that role, we're going to pay for it.

Tavis: Is there a way out?

Phillips: I think there are ways out. You can go back and look at some of the previous oil crises, and one thing Jimmy Carter did when he was President was to try to cut back and conserve use of energy. And that included putting much higher standards on automobiles to get better gasoline mileage. Now the Republicans tend to represent the producer states in terms of oil. And the people who drive a lot, I don't think they're gonna wanna go that route. But I think we have to, at some point.

Tavis: The second argument, the second piece of this triangle in this book "American Theocracy,' we touched on a moment ago, but you argue that there's a problem in our society of politics aligning with religion.

Phillips: Absolutely. What we've seen, especially since the Republican Party, uh, took over the south and started to command the allegiance of the south is that most of the religious people in the United States have found their way into the Republican Party. Originally back in the fifties and sixties, the Democrats had more northern Catholics, ethnic Catholics, and southern fundamentalists, Baptists, and Evangelicals.

Now the Democrats have lost a lot of those people. The Republicans have added them to their mix. And you have a Republican party that's far more religious, biblical, and caught up in, in all the prophecies and, and all the contests, really, of religion against science.

And the upshot of all this is that from a lot of perspectives, whether it's in the Middle East or questions of stem cell research or of science versus the bible, the Republican Party represents a much more religious slice of America. And it, it's not gonna turn around.

Tavis: You made the point earlier, Mr. Phillips, that with regard to a certain part of this conversation, where politics align with religion, it doesn't much matter what party you are a member of, to the point you made earlier. Let me take that and flip it, if I might. I asked you earlier if there was a way out of the oil situation that you lay out in the book.

Is there a way out for Democrats, specifically, on this particular issue of the right being the party of those who profess to be spiritual, or those who are religious. Is there a way out, including having a Democratic candidate who's not afraid to speak to his or her faith in the same way that Republicans do? Or is that not the answer?

Phillips: Well, I think that's certainly part of the answer. If you have a Democratic candidate who's willing to speak to his or her faith in an intelligent way, and show that there's a rival interpretation, I think, of Christianity that doesn't depend just on the end times and the Middle East, and Jesus the terminator, and everybody driving around in a Hummer on the interstates during the end times, and so forth.

That's kind of a gruesome blueprint. There are alternative views of Christianity. But I think far more important for the Democrats is that the Republican movement into what we can think of as sort of extreme territory here gives the Democrats a chance to talk about the Republicans having gone way too far, without having to re-fight the battle of the Democrats not having enough interest in religion, which frankly is an argument they lost.

And I think what they can do now is move the argument to the Republican excesses. You can link what's going on in the Middle East in many ways to some of the attitudes of the Republican biblical constituency.

Tavis: Let me ask, then, on that notion, whether or not it is an absolute prerequisite that whomever the Democrats nominate in '08 will have to speak to those issues, have to speak to his or her faith in a way that Democrats have not done since, say, Jimmy Carter? Bill Clinton certainly did it, but Jimmy Carter's the best example, I think.

Phillips: I think they'll have to speak to their faith, but John Kerry actually did, but it was a very simplistic portrait. He talked about how he was an altar boy when he was young. I don't think that impressed anybody very much, because it was just sort of volunteering, gee, I was an altar boy; that makes me very religious.

I think people now are gonna have to have a sense of exactly what their particular religious view means, in terms of the interaction with public policy, or the lack of it. Because in the case of George W. Bush, his religious view is very close to how he interprets politics and policy making. And he won't discuss that.

That was one of the most vivid messages of the four and a half minutes of saying nothing that followed that answer. I think in the future, starting probably this year and certainly in 2008, they're gonna have to talk about it in a meaningful way, and not just posture as having been an altar boy, or something like that.

Tavis: So are you telling me then, Mr. Phillips, that this notion of the separation of church and state in our politics, as it were, is obsolete?

Phillips: No, I don't think it is obsolete. What we have now is a threat to the notion of separation of church and state. Because you've got so many people bulked up in the Republican Party who actually would like to see less separation between church and state. And they're trying to bend things in that direction right now.

That's certainly true of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. They want much less separation. And I think that that should be the debate in itself. Are we going to try to get away from what has been the strength of the United States, separation of church and state, and move in the direction that many Republicans want to, which is to bring religion and politics much closer together. And I think if that issue was put to the American people, they're gonna continue to say, keep it apart.

Tavis: So you think that would be a winning issue for Democrats.

Phillips: If they do it well. And that's always a tough thing (laugh) with the Democrats. It's not the sharpest tacks in the hardware store, there. (Laugh)

Tavis: Yeah. (Laugh) Point well taken. The third part of this theocratic triangle, as we are calling it, is the growing national debt.

Phillips: The national debt is a mess, but it's not just government debt, it's all kinds of debt. The United States has become a debt culture in many ways in the last two or three decades, and I think to our great detriment. Some of the numbers are horrible. You've got what they call total credit market debt in the United States, that's tradable debt, basically, $40 trillion.

As compared with a gross domestic product that's maybe about 11. So we've got a huge amount of debt. It comes in all flavors. Government, private, consumer, mortgage. We're also the world's single biggest international debtor. We owe some four trillion dollars globally. Now, all of this adds up to a mess.

It's not so easy to explain to the average person, but basically, we've borrowed and borrowed and borrowed, and a fair amount of the prosperity is borrowed, because people owe on it. And now as interest rates are ratcheting up, that's gonna make the payments on credit cards and mortgage debt steadily more painful. And the question is, can we afford it? Is there a housing bubble that's gonna pop and then raise questions about that portion of the debt burden?

Tavis: You call both parties, Republican and Democrat, mutating organisms. I wonder what, then, you see as the future of the Republican Party? How is it gonna mutate yet again?

Phillips: Well, the idea of a mutating organism isn't all bad. They should be changing. But I think part of the question here is that you have calcified organisms. In other words, they're not very fresh. They're not very flexible. They're way down with interest groups and past commitments.

And frankly, I have a lot of trouble seeing those two parties change in a way that will create the dialogue on all these difficult issues, 'cause they really don't wanna talk about them.

Tavis: Let me close in the last 30 seconds here, taking you back right quick to your Nixon years. We all know your history. What did Richard Nixon most do right?

Phillips: Hard to say, because Watergate nipped it in the bud. I think Nixon was very good in the foreign policy arena, with the help of Henry Kissinger. He, I think, hung on too long in Vietnam. Maybe he should have ended it right off the mark. But he certainly didn't make it a lot worse. It was a mess when we got in.

What Nixon did right that he did wrong, and it's a funny way to put it, but he actually tried to create more of a social services network with family assistance plan, national health insurance, and so forth, but it was inept. Some of it was ahead of its time, and some of it wasn't thought out well. And he fell on his face with that. So it doesn't count as having done it well.

Tavis: Agree or disagree, he's one of the most brilliant minds in American politics today, and for many years, for that matter. The new book, "American Theocracy,' by the 'New York Times' best-selling author Kevin Phillips. Nice to have you on the program.

Phillips: Nice to be here.

Tavis: Honor. Up next, rising hip-hop star Tip "T.I." Harris. Stay with us.