Kevin Phillips, one of the better minds writing on American politics, has just released American Theocracy, which looks at not just the influence of the U.S. religious right on the Bush administration, but a whole range of factors that point to looming American decline.

Some excerpts from the review by NYT critic Michiko Kakutani:

The book not only reiterates observations made in "Wealth and Democracy" and "American Dynasty," but also reworks some of the arguments made by the historian Paul Kennedy in "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," dealing with the role that economic factors play in the fortunes of great powers and the dangers empires face in becoming financially and militarily overextended.

All in all, "American Theocracy" is a more reasoned (and therefore more sobering) book than "American Dynasty," substituting copious illustrations and detailed if sometimes partisan analysis for angry, conspiratorial rants. But if Mr. Phillips does an artful job of pulling together a lot of electoral data and historical insights to buttress his polemical points, he also demonstrates a tendency to extrapolate — sometimes profligately — from the specific to the general, from the particular to the collective, especially when making his prognostications of impending decline. ...

In the case of America today, Mr. Phillips blames the Republican party and its base for spurring many of the troubling developments — namely, "U.S. oil vulnerability, excessive indebtedness and indulgence of radical religion" — that he says are threatening the country's future.

"The Republican electoral coalition," he declares, "near and dear to me four decades ago, when I began writing 'The Emerging Republican Majority,' has become more and more like the exhausted, erring majorities of earlier failures: the militant, Southernized Democrats of the 1850's; the stock-market-dazzled and Elmer Gantry-ish G.O.P. of the 1920's; and the imperial liberals of the 1960's with their Great Society social engineering, quagmire in Vietnam and New Economy skills expected to tame the business cycle."

Unfortunately for the reader, Mr. Phillips does not use his familiarity with G.O.P. politics to examine more fully the future of the Republican party. While he writes that "theological correctness stands to be a Republican Achilles' heel," he does little to flesh out this notion; nor does he do much to illuminate the factional splits within the party that have grown during the presidency of George W. Bush: from fiscal conservatives furious about this administration's deficit spending to pragmatic party regulars worried about the president's tumbling poll numbers to growing numbers of conservatives upset about the administration's decision to go to war with Iraq and its pursuit of Wilsonian foreign policy ideals.

In an afterword, Mr. Phillips suggests that the G.O.P. coalition is "fatally flawed from a national-interest standpoint" partly because it is dominated "by an array of outsider religious denominations caught up in biblical morality, distrust of science and a global imperative of political and religious evangelicalism," but he does not really explain why this development could lead to a Republican downfall. Perhaps he is saving that for his next book — when the results of the midterm elections are known.