Beware the Theocons?

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The New York Sun

If you’re one of those unhappy people who feel compelled to follow the burps and gurgles of the U.S. political debate, you will have noticed the recent introduction of a new word. The term “theocon” is suddenly everywhere. Worse, “theocons” themselves are suddenly everywhere – or so we are supposed to think.


Theocon, as you might guess, is a portmanteau of two other words, theocracy and conservative, to describe conservatives whose religious beliefs, usually of the traditional Christian variety, move them to become politically active.


That might seem innocent enough to you, but the word itself is intended as a pejorative – meant to send shivers up every sensitive spine.


The Paul Revere who has taken it upon himself to sound the alarm about the theocon invasion is Kevin Phillips, a professional polemicist who 37 years ago wrote a prescient book called “The Emerging Republican Majority.” When the predicted Republican majority did indeed emerge, a decade or so after his book, Phillips was hailed as a visionary.


Then his crystal ball went dark. For a quarter of a century now Phillips has been predicting, to quote the title of another of his books, a “Post-Conservative America.” Unfortunately for him, that book was published in 1982 and had the following thesis:


“The question for the political analyst is no longer whether Ronald Reagan will succeed or fail. He is failing, and attention must now focus upon the ramifications and dimensions of that failure.”


Wait. Did I say “unfortunately for him?” I apologize. There is no “unfortunately” here. Despite being consistently wrong for decades, Phillips retains his image as a visionary, at least in U.S. faculty lounges, foundation offices, newsrooms, and the Nantucket Island farmers market – wherever the elite meet to tremble over the fate of their country.


They will be delighted with Phillips’s new distress signal, “American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.” As that ungainly subtitle suggests, Phillips sees a three-pronged threat to U.S. democracy – with oilmen and bankers joining the theocons in unholy collusion.


But it is the theocons who truly get his heart jumping, though it’s never quite clear why. Phillips seems to believe that religious conservatives want to dismantle the federal government even as they turn it into an all-powerful instrument of their theocratic will. Doing both at once really would be a miracle.


He refers often to “the commitment by the Bush White House and the religious right to reduce the current separation between church and state.” He doesn’t amplify – the great thing about being a visionary is you don’t have to do the detail work – but I suppose he’s talking about President George W. Bush’s so-called “faith-based initiative” that would allow churches to administer some federally funded social service programs.


This initiative, always rather mild in design, is in any event politically dead, having failed to pass even a Congress controlled by the same Republican Party that, in turn, is supposedly controlled by the theocons.


Nor does Phillips mention that the initiative itself was controversial among religious conservatives, many of whom feared any entanglement with the federal regulatory leviathan. He might be surprised at how many conservative Christians prize the “separation of church and state” purely out of self-defense.


Phillips worries that Bush believes God has called him to do what he does as president. That’s probably true.


After all, most religious believers, whether they’re politicians or stevedores, believe that their relationship with God informs how they do their work; this is one of the things that make them religious.


And it’s not as though Bush tried to hide this element in his thinking from voters. Few presidential campaigners have been so open – indeed, so tiresomely and compulsively self-exposing – about their religious beliefs.


At times, Phillips’s fretting inflates into comical paranoia. You can almost see the eyes dart and bulge, the upper lip moisten and quiver, when Phillips says that Bush is “double-coding” his public statements – speaking words that are “only mildly religious on the surface, but beneath that full of allusions to biblical passages and Christian hymns.” Abraham Lincoln did that too, you know, and look what happened to him.


Phillips’s implicit theme is that the confluence of religion and democratic politics is inherently anti-democratic. This will be news to anyone who admires the abolition movement of the 19th century or the civil rights movement of the 20th, both of which were promoted and led by religious personages using religious reasoning and religious rhetoric.


One might be tempted to say that Phillips is really advocating a kind of reverse (and unconstitutional) “religious test” for politicians: Orthodox believers should stay out of politics altogether.


One might be tempted to say this, but one should resist the temptation, lest one become like Phillips himself. He is a paragon of today’s degenerate political debate, in which each side insists, hysterically, that the other is not merely wrong but dangerous. The U.S. constitutional system is designed precisely to stymie extremists – yet professional polemicists claim that their political opposites have an open field to tyranny.


If Phillips is a visionary, it’s an apocalyptic vision that has him in its grip, a left-wing version of the End Times. What is he – some kind of religious nut?



Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.


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