I picked this up a few days ago and started reading it yesterday.
Is there anyone else out there reading it or that’s already read it and who’s interested in discussing it?
I respect Kevin Phillips’s past work. I haven’t read American Theocracy, but he’s been prowling the talkshow circuit, plugging it. Is it holding your interest?
So far, yes. I just finished part one, on oil. My biggest criticism is that he doesn’t causaully link the government’s pro-oil actions with specific motivations. He’ll describe a piece of legislation or some other historical event that unquestionably does involve oil, but doesn’t demonstrate that it was overtly caused by oil interests. But that’s a very hard link to make, and the volume of “circumstantial” evidence he presents is pretty convincing.
The most interesting bits so far have to be the comparisons he draws between America’s dependence on oil, the UK’s dependence on coal, the Netherland’s dependence on windmills and the effect that the wax and wane of their respective energy sources had on their empires.
How could the supply of wind in the Netherlands “wax and wane”?
In absolute terms, it obviously can’t. But the amount of energy that can be extracted from the wind can “wax” by technological increases (Dutch windmills were surprisingly sophisticated given the time period) and can “wane” relative to other (emerging) sources of energy. Like, say, coal-powered steam engines.
What’s really interesting is that the national focus on a given energy source seems to act as an inertial blinder to the obvious pitfalls of that energy source–in terms of infrastructure, business interests, and cultural identity.
“Cultural identity”?