http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19058In the early 1970s, the United States imported approximately one third of the oil it consumed. Today, it imports almost 60 percent and by 2025, so the Energy Department forecasts, the US will probably have to import 65 percent of its oil. Meanwhile, worldwide demand for energy will rise rapidly, especially as China and India increase their consumption, keeping up the prices American consumers and businesses pay for gasoline, home heating oil, kerosene, and jet fuel, as well as other petroleum products crucial for industries like plastics and pharmaceuticals.
But until recently—when rising gasoline prices have forced Bush to talk of conservation—the Bush administration's domestic energy policy has emphasized a proposal that will hardly ameliorate the nation's energy dependency.<1> For five years, it has strenuously sought to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to private petroleum exploration. Even if successful, however, Alaskan drilling would reduce the nation's oil imports modestly at best from 65 percent of its needs in 2025 to 61 or 62 percent and, in doing so, damage a valuable natural environment.<2> So far, Congress has not granted the administration its wish.
In Kevin Phillips's view, the Bush energy policy is a prime example of America's failure to confront its most difficult challenges. Phillips, once a member of the Nixon administration, has written a timely book that argues that America is very different from the independent and omnipotent nation portrayed by President Bush and his administration. Dependency on oil is one of three major tendencies that will seriously undermine America's future, he writes, the other two being the influence of radical religion and the growing reliance on debt to support the economy. For Phillips, these constitute "the three major perils to the United States of the twenty-first century," and he offers little hope that the US will avoid the consequences. Since he wrote his widely read The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969, Phillips has published several books lamenting how poorly the Republicans have handled their responsibilities. American Theocracy is his most pessimistic work to date.
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Phillips did not foresee fully the damage done by the Republican majority as a counterforce to what he once saw as the tendencies of liberal Democrats to promote social engineering and anti-religious sentiment during the 1960s and 1970s. The Republicans succeeded by portraying government social programs and market regulations as obstacles to the nation's progress. In doing so, the new Republican majority crippled the most important instruments with which to deal with a rapidly changing world. The neoliberal system of largely unregulated markets has had its share of spectacular economic developments, information technology high among them. But it never alone could solve the nation's major problems, and now, increasingly unregulated, the oil and finance industries, among others, are doing much damage. The Republican majority has been taken over by extremists who promise their own version of social engineering, from teaching intelligent design in public schools to the promotion of various "pro-life" causes.
The test of an industrialized nation is whether it can maintain a balance between community and private interests. To what extent is America doomed to decline as a result of the policies imposed by the Bush administration and its allies that favor the rich and powerful? This is the unspoken issue that hovers over Phillips's book. For all its dramatic and useful emphasis on oil, evangelism, and debt, it remains too narrow in its approach to fully engage the large threats we face.
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