Slate's Jacob Weisberg has a hit piece out on Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy.

It's unremittingly negative. But, alas for Jacob, if he wants to take down Kevin Phillips as a no nothing geek who gets everything wrong, then he's gone about it the wrong way....

In 1969, an obscure Republican political strategist named Kevin Phillips published a nerdy, statistics-laden book titled The Emerging Republican Majority that offered a Machiavellian analysis of how the GOP could use the issue of race to win over working-class Democrats and ensure future political dominance. In the years since, almost every aspect of that description has been turned around. Phillips long ago left behind both obscurity and conservatism, becoming one of our most ubiquitous political commentators and one of the most left-wing. His biennial books have become illogical, dizzying screeds. And his diagnoses, predictions, and advice to Democrats have been consistently, embarrassingly wrong.

Jacob, it's nice that you say that he's been consistently wrong, and you attempt to show where he is wrong repeatedly in the rest of the article - but you only talk about his most recent book. If you're going to say he's been wrong all the time, perhaps you should give some examples?

The Phillips method is to begin a chapter with a boldly stated thesis: America invaded Iraq to seize its oil. Having gotten your attention, he departs on a pompous, pedantic history tour: tar in the Bible, medieval mineralogy, Italian olive oil, the Basque whaling trade, the British carve-up of the Middle East, the rise of the automobile, and so on. Thirty pages later, having presented no evidence and answered no objections (So, why did the oil companies oppose the Iraq war?), he restates his claim more hyperbolically: "During the first George W. Bush administration, that reliance [on automobiles] dictated an attempt to turn the Persian Gulf into an American filling station so as to maintain high energy consumption." At least Michael Moore tries to make us laugh when he says stuff like this.

All right Jacob - why did Bush invade Iraq? See, at least Phillips has plausability going. What's your explanation? Do you believe it was to find WMD? To spread democracy? Why don't you tell us? Because what we know is that the Bush administration gave around 20 different reasons for invading Iraq during the run up to the war. The main one was because Iraq supposedly had WMD, but there was never any evidence of that, and the US army didn't even bother to bring the necessary chemical and biological warfare gear with them. They knew, just as everyone with sense knew, that Saddam didn't have squat. So why did Iraq get invaded? The other reason was supposedly a connection to 9/11, but that never existed and the Bush administration knew it; was told it repeatedly.

Let me put it another way - if Iraq didn't have oil, would it have been invaded? If Iraq wasn't in the middle east, would it have been invaded? If it really had nukes, would it have been invaded? We all know the answer is no to at least two of those questions (ie. if it had oil, but didn't have WMD or be in the Middle East, maybe it would have been.)

The truth is that your arguments are more dishonest than the ones you claim Phillips made - because Phillips argument is at least plausible, and certainly the fact that Iraq had oil was one of the reasons why it was invaded.

As for the oil companies - who knows what they really thought. Unless, of course, you have access to the minutes of their private meetings with Cheney that the administration has refused to release?

Drilling may become uneconomic, Phillips notes, if more energy is required to find and extract a barrel of oil than the barrel contains—"at least until the price of oil rises." Sorry, but if it costs more than a barrel of oil to make a barrel of oil, a higher price won't help.

It's not Phillips who has no clue, it's you. Because you're conflating "the amount of energy of a barrel of oil" with "a barrel of oil". Not the same thing. Oil is a superior form of energy to many others - when was the last time you used the same amount of energy that exists in a gallon of gas, in the form of coal, to run your car?

Right then. In fact, if it cost more energy to produce a barrel of oil than a barrel of oil is worth there would still be some oil being produced, though nearly as much as now, because oil is a very good form of energy and it has many non energy uses. (Check with your local plastics manufacturing association if you don't believe me. Oil is a biochemical soup, perfect for manufuacturing so many different materials that our society is hardly imaginable without it, even without using it for energy.)

Reagan ran larger deficits in GDP terms than Bush has done, but a more fiscally prudent successor reversed them.

Reagan wasn't cooking the books. If you believe the official figures, you are a fool. Reagan also wasn't pushing most of the costs of his cuts into the future, by pretending that cuts would go away. More to the point, Regan's America was not running as bad a balance of payments deficits, and did not have as bad a personal savings rate as Bush's America. The government deficit isn't the only deficit that matters. In fact, looked at overall, America is in much worse shape fiscally now than it was under Reagan.

Phillips' declinism relies on fatuous anti-market prejudices familiar from his earlier work: that a healthy economy must be based in manufacturing, that free trade and globalization impoverish us, that foreign ownership is treacherous, that industrial policy works, and that a robust financial sector means trouble.

Having read some of Phillips prior works that stikes me as a fatuous oversimplification of Phillips argument. Phillips despises what he calls financialization of economies, and guess what - the record of empires like the Dutch, the British and the Spanish supports his take. There's nothing wrong with a strong financial sector, there is something wrong when rentiers start becoming more important than capitalists. And that's what happened. But you, Jacob, probably couldn't explain the difference between Rent and Capital, you appear to think they're the same thing. Ricardo didn't agree, and neither did Adam Smith - and neither does Phillips.

Let me hand you a clue - what you are mostly selling to the rest of the world in exchange for their money is... claims on future income and claims on future growth. Not goods. Not services, but promises that in the future you'll give them something worth something. Phillips is quite worried to be concerned by that, especially since your balance of payments deficit is now over the historic norm that has been proven to be unsustainable for every other country. But I'm sure America will find that people are willing to lend it money forever, for nothing but promises. It hasn't worked for anyone else, but hey I'm sure you're right, and Phillips is wrong.

In the Phillips worldview, plutocrats exploit the American proletariat, which supports the policies that keep it miserable out of false consciousness—the poor hicks actually believe Christ is coming to save them.

Jacob, I hate to break this to you, but in fact there's been a class war and the rich won. Ordinary people haven't seen one cent added to their paychecks in 30 years, but they have seen their debts rise and had to send their spouses to work to make ends meet. I know you probably don't give one good goddamn about people who earn hourly wages, who aren't credentialled and who aren't managers or professionals - but for those people, things haven't gotten better, they've gotten worse.

That's simply a fact. As is the fact that the majority of productivity gains over the last 30 years have gone to the wealthy. The top 1% have done great. The top .1% even better. The top 10% have done well, and the top 20% ok. And for everyone else gains have either been marginal, or non existent.

You can spin that however you like, but unlike you Phillips knows how to read statistics, and knows that, in fact, ordinary people have been taking an economic bath and the plutocrats have been doing great.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence, and that the plutocrats haven't been trying to make more money. I'm sure they'd be willing to give up all those gains by, say, paying more taxes so the middle class and the working class can get real tax breaks. I'm sure they spent a lot of time arguing with Reagan and Bush when they lowered the taxes on rich people far more than they lowered them on poor people, or when Bush tried to repeal the estate tax so that dead rich people's heirs, who had never earned the money, could have tax break paid for by living people who earned their money and still need it.

No Jacob, I think if anyone lives in fantasyland spouting bullshit, it'd be you. Because Phillips is, as you point out so helpfully, a geek.

In other words he's done his research and he knows the numbers and you Jacob, don't.

That's not to say Phillips is perfect, or he got everything right, or that his advice is the best in the world. But he's far from clueless and he's right more than he's wrong, and your pathetic column is wrong far more often than it's right.

Democrats could do far worse than to listen to Phillips. And they could do far better than to listen to Jacob Weisberg, the man who appears to think that rich people got that way without any help from the government and that ordinary Americans have taking on water for 30 years has nothing to do with either government policy or policies that the rich have pushed the government to adopt.

Because the rich spend all that money on elections, on buying pundits, on placing op-eds, on think tanks and on direct donations to politicians out of the goodness of their heart and pure civic duty. They certainly don't expect any return on that investment, do they Jacob?

What's clear from your hit piece, Jacob, is not that Phillips doesn't know what he's talking about, but that you are someone who is completely out of touch with any form of reality - neither the reality of statistics, not the reality of how people really operate in the real world (clue: rich people don't invest hundreds of millions or billions in political infrastructure because they think there's no return, Jacob), seems to have any effect on what passes for thought in that head of yours.