All successful lobbies flaunt their power. But unlike, say, the Cuban lobby or the AARP, there’s a taboo against outsiders discussing the influence of AIPAC or the Israel lobby more generally, or criticizing the way it shapes American policy. To do so raises the specter of poisonous old narratives about mysterious cabals and dual loyalties, of hateful tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and “The International Jew.” So a strange, dim silence surrounds the Israel lobby, and the hushed atmosphere nurtures conspiracy theories about a power so great and so secret that you can’t even talk about it in public. Those conspiracy theories make the issue even more fraught, because respectable people don’t want to provide fodder for the likes of former Klan leader David Duke, who writes on his Web site, “Just as Jewish Israel-Firsters dominate the mass media, so Congress and the President are afflicted by the Israeli Lobby. ”

Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, political science professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, apparently hoped to break through the taboos with their baldly titled paper “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” It was published last month in the London Review of Books and, in an expanded version, on the Web site of the Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is academic dean. The article argues that the United States’ close relationship with Israel is not in America’s national interest — that it is, indeed, counterproductive — and that it is sustained largely through the work of the Israel lobby (Walt and Mearsheimer refer to it, simply and ominously, as “the Lobby.”) Walt and Mearsheimer also argue that the lobby was a major force pushing for war in Iraq, a war they vocally opposed.

“In our piece, we argued that when people are critical of Israeli policy or the U.S.-Israeli relationship, the arguments are not taken on their merits,” Mearsheimer says when reached by phone. “What happens instead is that the great silencer — the charge of anti-Semitism — is leveled at the critics.”

In this case, that’s just what has happened. Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel called the paper “the same old anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel,” adding, “Given what happened in the Holocaust, it’s shameful that people would write reports like this.” In a response to Walt and Mearsheimer published on the Kennedy School Web site last week, law professor Alan Dershowitz asked, “What would motivate two recognized academics to issue a compilation of previously made assertions that they must know will be used by overt anti-Semites to argue that Jews have too much influence, that will give an academic imprimatur to crass bigotry, and that will place all Jews in government and the media under suspicion of disloyalty to America?” Neoconservative Johns Hopkins professor Eliot A. Cohen penned a column about the paper in the Washington Post titled, “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic.”

On the surface, the whole imbroglio seemed like the latest version of a story that has replayed itself countless times in the last few years. A public figure strays outside the boundaries of acceptable opinion about Israel, or calls attention to the disproportionate influence wielded by supporters of Israel’s right-wing political factions, and is immediately attacked as a bigot or a paranoid. It happened to Howard Dean during the Democratic primary, when he said that the United States should be “evenhanded” in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, admonished him; an Israeli newspaper suggested that his Jewish backing would dry up; and Nancy Pelosi wrote him an angry open letter. All this despite the fact that Dean’s campaign was being co-chaired by a former president of AIPAC, and there was little daylight between his position on Israel and that of President Bush.

Not even such a famous friend of Israel as Steven Spielberg is immune to this kind of mau-mauing. When his movie “Munich,” about the Israeli response to the Palestinian massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, was released last year, various commentators berated him for being insufficiently Manichean in his treatment of the conflict. As Leon Wieseltier wrote in the staunchly pro-Israel New Republic, “Palestinians murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show evidence of a conscience … All these analogies begin to look ominously like the sin of equivalence, and so it is worth pointing out that the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective.”

At first glance, it seemed as if Walt and Mearsheimer were being run through a familiar wringer. Indeed, many of the charges against them have been grossly unfair. To their chagrin, David Duke has enthusiastically embraced the paper, calling it “a modern American declaration of independence.” Some critics have used this to associate the authors with the former Klansman. “Walt, Mearsheimer, and Duke happen to have reached the same conclusions, and share the same interest in vilifying Jewish leaders and spouting conspiracy theories about Zionist plots against American interests,” wrote Dershowitz. Stretching in a different direction, the Israeli historian Michael Oren, writing in the New Republic, blamed the affair on the malign influence of the late Edward Said and a postmodern coterie “infused with the nihilism of postmodern French philosophers.” This charge was especially odd, since Walt and Mearsheimer are known as two of the foremost exponents of political realism, a hardheaded school of thought that owes far more to Henry Kissinger than to Michel Foucault.

On one level, then, the attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer are examples of the very phenomenon the writers describe. Yet for anyone who hopes for a more open and critical discussion of the Israel lobby, their paper presents profound problems. This is not just a case of brave academics telling taboo truths. In taking on a sensitive, fraught subject, one might expect such eminent scholars to make their case airtight. Instead, they’ve blundered forth with an article that has several factual mistakes and baffling omissions, one that seems expressly designed to elicit exactly the reaction it has received. The power of the Israel lobby is something that deserves a full and fearless airing, but this paper could make such an airing less, not more likely.

Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper began as an article commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly in 2002 on the subject of Israel and the U.S. National Interest. The magazine turned down the piece they submitted — editor Cullen Murphy wrote them a letter explaining why, though none of them will comment on what it said. According to Mearsheimer, he and Walt thought the piece was dead, but then a scholar who’d read it put them in touch with the editor of the London Review of Books, who agreed to publish a rewritten version. They posted the expanded essay on the Harvard Web site to coincide with the London publication.

The authors waste no time stating their case. “The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy,” they write on the first page. “For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security.”

Even one sympathetic to Walt and Mearsheimer’s criticism of the Israel lobby should be struck by this assertion. After all, there’s a very strong case to be made that the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy for the past several decades has been oil. Walt and Mearsheimer barely address oil, or the American relationship with Saudi Arabia. Similarly, in their view, the Iraq war had little to do with oil and much to do with Zionism.

“There is virtually no evidence that oil was an important cause of the Iraq war,” Mearsheimer says. “It is an intuitively plausible argument, but when you look for evidence that the oil companies were pushing for war, or that Paul Wolfowitz was thinking in terms of oil as a geopolitical weapon, you cannot find it. Instead, you find lots of evidence that the neoconservatives and the leaders of the Lobby were pushing hard for war against Iraq.”

In fact, though, such evidence does exist — it has been compiled by Paul Roberts, author of “The End of Oil,” by analysts like James Paul of the Global Policy Forum, and by Kevin Phillips in “American Theocracy.” Phillips quotes James Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, saying, “what they [the Bush administration] have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies. The American oil companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of this war.” In his memoir “The Right Man,” David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter and neocon par excellence, wrote that Bush’s campaign to bring freedom to the Middle East would also “bring new prosperity to us all, by securing the world’s largest pool of oil.” After the conservative public interest group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request, a court ordered the Commerce Department to turn over documents from Cheney’s Task Force; among them are Iraq oil maps and lists of foreign suitors for Iraqi oil-field contracts. And, of course, there’s the fact that, as Baghdad burned immediately after the 2003 invasion, the only government building the Americans saw fit to protect was the oil ministry.

This doesn’t prove that oil was the only factor in the war, and that Israel had nothing to do with it. But it does suggest that oil was at least a factor, casting some doubt on Walt and Mearsheimer’s assertion that “the war was due in large part to the lobby’s influence, especially the neoconservatives within it.”

Perhaps they don’t find any of the available evidence about the role of oil compelling, but that’s not what they argue — they simply ignore it. A similar pattern repeats throughout “The Israel Lobby.” There is little nuance and few caveats; facts that run contrary to their thesis are simply left out or, in a few cases, twisted. In his response, Dershowitz finds several factual errors that make the authors seem strangely careless. Most relate to the moral case against Israel.

As realists, Walt and Mearsheimer generally oppose giving idealism an important role in foreign policy decision-making. But because they argue in “The Israel Lobby” that considerations of morality can’t account for America’s support for Israel, they have to engage in moral arguments. “Viewed objectively, Israel’s past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians,” they write.

As Walt and Mearsheimer surely know, that’s a striking and hugely controversial claim. So it’s odd that they weren’t more careful in trying to back it up. Much of their case is compelling, but it is undermined by their own errors.

They are certainly correct when they write that, while Israel’s creation was largely a response to horrific crimes against the Jews, “[T]he creation of Israel involved additional crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.

“Israeli scholarship shows that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs,” they continue, citing the work of famed Israeli historian Benny Morris. “The Arab inhabitants did resist the Zionists’ encroachments, which is hardly surprising given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab lands. The Zionists responded vigorously, and neither side owns the moral high ground during this period. This same scholarship also reveals that the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved explicit acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres, and rapes by Jews.”

All this has been documented, although it’s not the whole story. If Americans tend to believe that Israel has the moral upper hand over the Palestinians, it’s not because of the conditions of the country’s founding, it’s because of decades of Arab aggression and Palestinian terrorism. Amazingly, Walt and Mearsheimer don’t even mention Fatah or Black September, Munich or Entebbe. One might argue that Israel has killed more Palestinians than visa versa, but it doesn’t change the role of spectacular Palestinian terrorism in shaping American attitudes toward Israel.

Worse still is the way Walt and Mearsheimer sometimes subtly twist the historical record to make their case against Israel even more damning. Dershowitz catches them quoting David Ben-Gurion strikingly out of context: “Ben-Gurion is … quoted by Mearsheimer and Walt as saying that ‘it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion,’ making it seem as if Ben-Gurion was advocating a ‘brutal compulsion.’ But they omit what Ben-Gurion said after that: ‘but we should in no way make it part of our programme.’ By omitting Ben-Gurion’s critical conclusions, they falsely suggest that Ben-Gurion was proposing the opposite of what he said.”

They do something similar, though less serious, when they write that the Jewish newspaper the Forward once described Paul Wolfowitz as “the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the Administration.” As Forward editor J.J. Goldberg noted in an editorial, “A check of the endnotes shows that the words did appear in the Forward, but they were describing the conventional wisdom, not the Forward’s view. The article was about a pro-Israel rally where Wolfowitz was booed for defending Palestinian rights. The point was that the conventional wisdom was wrong.”

Walt and Mearsheimer also confuse critical issues about Israeli citizenship, which they say is “based on the principal of blood kinship.” That’s simply not true — as Dershowitz writes, “In reality, a person of any ethnicity or religion can become an Israeli citizen. In fact, approximately a quarter of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish, a higher percentage of minority citizenry than in nearly any other country … The paper’s authors confuse Israel’s law of return — which was designed to grant asylum to those who were victims of anti-Semitism, including non-Jewish relatives of Jews — with its law of citizenship.”

These errors, and others like them, don’t nullify the paper’s thesis, but they’re evidence of a weird haphazardness. This is an enormously sensitive subject, but Walt and Mearsheimer’s approach is too often clumsy and crude. That’s especially true in their discussion of the divided loyalties of some American Jews, and of the pro-war manipulations of the lobby. They conflate groups that are merely sympathetic to Israel with those that actively back the hard-line policies of the Likud. Though they try to draw distinctions between the lobby and American Jewry more generally, they occasionally use the two terms interchangeably, citing Jewish campaign donations, for example, as evidence of the lobby’s power.

“The Lobby also has significant leverage over the Executive branch,” they write. “That power derives in part from the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections. Despite their small numbers in the population (less than 3 percent), they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 percent of the money.’” This treatment of Jewish money as a monolithic force is both ugly and misleading; the agenda of liberal donors like George Soros and Peter Lewis is quite different from that of a hardcore Israel supporter like Jack Rosen, head of the American Jewish Congress. Anyway, the fact that Jews are crucial funders of Democrats is not evidence of their power over an executive branch that has been Republican for most of the last 25 years.

One could go on and on in this way, listing logical errors and over-generalizations. And that’s unfortunate, because it clouds what is valuable in “The Israel Lobby.” Walt and Mearsheimer are correct, after all, in arguing that discussion about Israel is hugely circumscribed in mainstream American media and politics. Citing the liberal, pro-Israel journalist Eric Alterman, they write that the public debate among Middle East pundits “is dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel. [Alterman] lists 61 columnists and commentators who can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification. Conversely, Alterman found just five pundits who consistently criticize Israeli behavior or endorse pro-Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favors the other side.” A person who got all their information from the American media would have little idea about the ways Jewish settlers continue to appropriate land in the West Bank, harassing local Palestinian farmers and uprooting their crops. Indeed, one can find far more critical coverage of the Israeli occupation in liberal Israeli newspapers like Haaretz than in any American daily.

And this gets at the real problem. It’s not that the lobby supports Israel, it’s that it consistently supports right-wing, irredentist factions in Israel. In doing so, it is out of step with most American Jewish opinion as well as much Israeli opinion, and yet it manages to act as if it speaks for both groups. The result is American policies that tacitly accept Israel expansionism, despite the fact that most American Jews favor territorial concessions. There are structural explanations for why the Israel lobby has been able to amass such influence despite how unrepresentative it is. Walt and Mearsheimer, unfortunately, lack the subtlety to explore them.

A few others have, though — Michael Massing wrote a hugely informative article about the Israel lobby for the American Prospect in 2002. Those who are most adept at influencing government policy in the Middle East, Massing wrote, “do not necessarily represent the broad range of Jewish views on the subject. At a time when Palestinian terror bombings grow more horrific daily and Israel military action in the occupied territories grows steadily harsher, the bias in political representation has complicated negotiations and reduced the likelihood that the United States will be able to mediate the conflict successfully.”

As Massing explained, the two most important pro-Israel lobbying outfits are AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Both are controlled by hard-liners and have been consistently biased toward the Likud, so much so that, as Massing writes, when the Labor Party’s Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister, he told AIPAC that it would no longer be Jerusalem’s representative in Washington. “[I]n contrast to the bullish statements AIPAC had issued on behalf of the Likud government, its board remained largely silent on Rabin’s peace initiative,” Massing wrote.

Indeed, AIPAC went out of its way to sabotage Rabin. In 1995, wrote Massing, its board “took up an issue calculated to impede Rabin’s efforts: the location of the U.S. embassy in Israel.” Like most countries, the United States had its embassy in Tel Aviv because of Jerusalem’s contested status. Under Oslo, talks on the future of the city were set to begin in 1996. “Flexing its muscle in Congress, [AIPAC] got 93 of 100 senators to sign a letter urging the administration to move the embassy by 1999, regardless of what happened in the negotiations. Going further, it got Republican Sen. Bob Dole, who was preparing to run for president against Bill Clinton, to introduce a bill that would make the transfer mandatory by that year.”

That bill was opposed by both Clinton and, importantly, the Israeli government. “Members of the Likud, by contrast, were jubilant,” Massing wrote. This episode goes to show that the Israel lobby is not, as Walt and Mearsheimer say, “a de facto agent for a foreign government.” It is, rather, part of a bi-national right-wing movement that encompasses Israeli conservatives and American hawks, Jewish and gentile. The power of this movement is deeply troubling — it perverts American political discourse, promotes policies that inflame the Arab world, destroys many Palestinian lives and ultimately endangers Israel. But to conflate this movement with American Jewry is dangerous, and that is what Walt and Mearsheimer sometimes do, albeit inadvertently.

They note the difference between the two, but then they ignore it, writing, for example, “There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to make U.S. foreign policy support Israel’s interests.” They argue as if there’s no need to point out the distinction between, say, Joe Lieberman, one of the Iraq war’s staunchest supporters, and Russ Feingold, one of its steadiest opponents. In their formulation, the fact that a congressman is Jewish creates suspicion of dual loyalties.

This accounts for some of the shock commentators have felt reading “The Israel Lobby.” While some of the outrage is part of the predictable hysteria that accompanies any serious criticism of Israel, there’s more to it than that. There is, after all, a reason for the taboo surrounding talk of Jewish power and treachery. Tales of Jewish groups using money and secret influence to twist politics for their own, unpatriotic ends are a hallmark of reaction, spouted by everyone from the Nazis to Father Charles Coughlin to David Duke. Walt and Mearsheimer are not anti-Semites, or aligned with anti-Semitic forces. They seem, however, somewhat oblivious as to why the issue they’ve taken on is so horribly sensitive, and they make little effort to address the causes of the taboo they’re trying to dislodge.

“They overlook the fact that the notion of this Jewish cabal with mystical powers has been an excuse for genocide for centuries,” says the Forward’s Goldberg, adding that you have to be careful “if you’re going to wander into that.”

Likewise, there is a history to countries, during crises of national morale, blaming their predicaments on Jewish manipulation. This is part of what frightens Goldberg. “America right now, I think people are going nuts,” he says. “You look at all the things going on, the Arctic is melting, the world hates us, we’ve bankrupted ourselves as a nation, you can name three or four things that are inconceivably bad. You don’t want to blame the American public — we elected this guy, twice. We can’t be that nuts. Somebody must have done this to us.”

For Goldberg, the paper is a worrying sign that a domestic version of the Dolchstosslegende — the conviction that Germany lost World War I because Jews “stabbed it in the back” — could somehow take root in America. “If Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer can buy into this stuff, I guess anybody can,” says Goldberg. “I actually didn’t believe it was possible. I’m one of those weirdoes who thought it wasn’t going to happen here. I found their document scary because it is so illogical and so passionate.”

Goldberg grants that Walt and Mearsheimer are “right that the Jewish community and the pro-Israel lobby, separately and in different ways, make it hard to have a debate, partly on purpose and partly because there’s a level of emotion there.” Before a rational discussion can proceed, some of that emotion has to be defused. Instead, it’s been stoked.

Meanwhile, Walt and Mearsheimer will likely pay a professional price, one that exceeds whatever criticism they deserve for their maladroit arguments. Walt will soon be stepping down from his job as academic dean — something he says was in the works well before the paper’s publication — and it’s unlikely he’ll ever be put in such a position again. “It is too soon to tell what all of the repercussions will be, but we believed going into this that both of us would pay a significant price in our professional lives,” says Mearsheimer. “We think, for example, that it would be almost impossible for Steve to ever be a high-level administrator at Harvard or any other top university. It is also highly unlikely that either one of us would ever get appointed to an important government position after this article. Plus there will be conferences and meetings that we won’t be invited to because of the piece.”

Other ambitious academicians may take notice and leave this subject alone, even if they could shed more light on it than Walt and Mearsheimer did. It would be a strange irony indeed if as a result of their attempt to break the taboo, it ended up stronger than ever.

He meant that literally — Boykin apparently believes that Satan’s supernatural soldiers participate in the military operations of America’s enemies, and that said soldiers can be captured on film. At several of his talks, he showed photos from the capital of Somalia, where he had commanded Delta Forces during the 1993 battle there. In the pictures, there were black streaks in the sky, photographic evidence, he said, of a “demonic spirit over the city of Mogadishu.”

To some, this kind of delusion might suggest that Boykin is not well and should be relieved of his duties. Instead, George W. Bush chose to promote him to deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, where he was put in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In his new position, Boykin served as military assistant to Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and he helped his boss bring the kind of torture and degradation that went on at Guantánamo Bay to Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. As Reuters reported in May 2004:

“The U.S. Army general under investigation for anti-Islamic remarks has been linked by U.S. officials to the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, which experts warned could touch off new outrage overseas.

“A Senate hearing into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was told on Tuesday that Lt. Gen. William Boykin, an evangelical Christian under review for saying his God was superior to that of the Muslims, briefed a top Pentagon civilian official last summer on recommendations on ways military interrogators could gain more intelligence from Iraqi prisoners.

“Critics have suggested those recommendations amounted to a senior-level go-ahead for the sexual and physical abuse of prisoners, possibly to ‘soften up’ detainees before interrogation — a charge the Pentagon denies.”

None of this hurt Boykin’s career, of course. Instead, Virginia Sen. George Allen — a likely GOP presidential candidate in 2008 — is now recommending Boykin to lead the U.S. Special Operations Command. According to the Associated Press, Allen sent a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urging him to nominate Boykin, saying he has the support of “many of my colleagues here in the Senate.”

It will be interesting to see if John McCain is one of those colleagues. He has been a staunch opponent of torture (to write that is to wistfully remember when that went without saying for almost everyone in public life), but he’s also desperate to score points with the religious right in preparation for his own presidential campaign.

As War Room noted on Monday, in 2000, McCain tried to separate himself from the dominant block within his party, denouncing Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.” He told Tim Russert, “Governor Bush swung far to the right and sought out the base support of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. That’s — those aren’t the ideas that I think are good for the Republican Party.” That kind of independence didn’t work out too well for him, so this year McCain is embracing the forces he once disdained, giving the commencement speech at Falwell’s Liberty University and telling Russert, “I believe that the Christ — quote, ‘Christian right,’ has a major role to play in the Republican Party.”

No doubt, the Christian right is going to line up behind Boykin. But will McCain back someone known for both his role in torture and his religious grandstanding? If he does, maybe it really is time to talk about the devil’s role in human affairs, because the senator will have sold his soul.

“I believe the most damaging thing Tom DeLay has done in his life is take his faith seriously in the public office, which made him a target of all those who despise the goals of Christ,” said Scarborough, a former college football player and longtime DeLay ally. Taking the stage before the 200 or so adoring activists in the banquet hall, DeLay ran with the end-times theme. “We have been chosen to live as Christians at a time when our culture is being poisoned and our world is being threatened, at a time when sides are being chosen and the future of man hangs in the balance,” he said. “The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will.”

A strange mix of dejection and ecstatic expectation pervaded the War on Christians conference. It was organized by Scarborough’s group, Vision America, the same outfit that put together last year’s Confronting the Judicial War on Faith gathering. At a time when the foot soldiers of the right feel weary and betrayed by the administration they helped put in office, it was meant to rally the base for 2006 by presenting the election in eschatological terms. The energy in the room sometimes felt sluggish, and people were clearly worried about November, forcing their leaders to work all the harder to motivate them for the political crusade.

“Bush has hurt his own troops very badly with what he’s done on immigration,” Phyllis Schlafly told me in a room outside the hall. “I think he’s really destroying his base with his views on bringing in more guest workers.” Others complained about Bush’s failure to push a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. People were shocked that the government America midwifed in Afghanistan seemed close to executing Christian convert Abdul Rahman. In the face of lassitude, speakers repeatedly cautioned against giving in to disillusionment and apathy. They reminded the audience that they are one judge away from overturning Roe v. Wade. They warned that Christianity is on the verge of being criminalized in America, and they harped on the manifold dangers of the “homosexual agenda.”

Perhaps worrying that anti-gay rhetoric hasn’t been sufficiently inflammatory lately, some speakers urged listeners to start using more scatological and stigmatizing language. Peter LaBarbera, who heads the Illinois Family Institute and is known for his obsession with gay men’s most outri sexual practices, told the audience, “My greatest frustration has been our side’s inability to make homosexual behavior an issue in the public’s mind.” In order to inspire the kind of revulsion he wants to see more of, he read from a posting on a gay message board: “Hey guys, I know this is kind of gross and all, but I was wondering if I’m the only one. I’m usually the bottom in my relationship with my boyfriend. After having been the receptive partner in anal sex it’s only a few hours before I start to experience diarrhea … it really stinks, because I really like sex, duh, but it takes the fun out of it when I know I’ll be tied to the bathroom for the next day.”

“I don’t think so-called GLBT teens are told anything like this” by their school counselors, LaBarbera said. “We need to find ways to bring shame back to those who are practicing and advocating homosexual behavior.”

These issues are nothing new on the religious right, of course — anti-gay and antiabortion politics have been central to the movement for decades. But the sense of crisis among the speakers was especially acute, and the calls to go on the offensive seemed urgent. Many proclaimed that America’s very survival is at stake. Some suggested that if the country doesn’t purify itself soon, it might not deserve to survive at all.

Laurence White, a bearded Lutheran pastor in a clerical collar who followed DeLay, repeated a quote that he, like many before him, erroneously ascribed to Alexis DeTocqueville: “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will also cease to be great.”

“My friends,” White said in a stentorian voice like burnished oak, “America is no longer good. Unrighteousness, evil, corruption, perversion and death are now standard operating procedure in the United States of America. If we do not put an end to it now, in this moment of divine destiny, then God will and God should judge America.”

This was remarkable language to hear at a political forum. Imagine if Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi gave a conference address that was followed by a furious condemnation of her country. She would have to scramble to distance herself from it and would be excoriated in the press regardless. But it’s not unusual to encounter this kind of thing at one of Scarborough’s events because they manage to bring together congressmen — this one featured Sen. John Cornyn and Republican Reps. Todd Akin and Louis Gohmert — with some of the most radical elements of what was once the right-wing fringe. (Sen. Sam Brownback was supposed to speak as well, but he couldn’t make it because he was needed for a vote).

At one point, speaker Herb Titus held up a copy of Kevin Phillips’ “American Theocracy,” offering it as evidence of the putative war on Christians. It was an audacious move, given that Sara Diamond, the preeminent scholar of the Christian right, reported in a 1998 book that Titus was forced to resign his post as dean of the law school at Pat Robertson’s Regent University because he refused to renounce Christian Reconstructionism. Christian Reconstructionism is a theocratic sect that advocates the replacement of civil law with biblical law, including the execution of homosexuals, apostates and women who are unchaste before marriage. Christian Reconstructionists used to be politically radioactive, but a new generation of religious right leaders like Scarborough have embraced them, and some members of today’s GOP apparently see no problem associating with them. This does not mean that America is on the verge of theocracy, but it signals an important shift. The language of religious authoritarianism has become at least somewhat politically acceptable.

Consider Rod Parsley, Pentecostal pastor of the World Harvest megachurch in Columbus, Ohio, a broad-shouldered, suntanned man who, like Scarborough, is emerging as one of the new generation of leaders of the religious right. He was a major force behind the mobilization for the anti-gay marriage amendment in Ohio, which in turn helped get out the evangelical vote that put Bush over the top in that state.

Parsley’s church is nearly half African-American, and he has a talent for mixing the soaring civil rights rhetoric and rousing call-and-response rhythms of traditional black preachers with classic populist demagoguery and exhortations to ostensibly metaphorical violence. When he speaks and shouts, his words building to alliterative climaxes as his arms wave in the air, sparks seem to fly off him.

“A spiritual invasion is taking place,” Parsley roared to the packed banquet hall on Tuesday morning, drawing out the “a” in invasion. “The secular media never likes it when I say this, so let me say it twice. Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons!” He paused to take a preemptive jab at his critics, his voice going soft and scolding: “They say, ‘his rhetoric is so inciting.’” Then he nearly screamed, “I came to incite a riot! Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! Lock and load!”

Parsley preached for a half hour, dabbing at his sweating face with a navy blue handkerchief as his excitement grew. Near the end, he promised, “A great and noble and righteous nation can resurrect itself out of the smoldering ash heap of moral decline that we find ourselves in today.”

Though the last case study in “The March of Folly” was about America’s war in Vietnam, Tuchman argued that the brilliance of the United States Constitution had thus far protected the country from the traumatic upheavals faced by most other nations. “For two centuries, the American arrangement has always managed to right itself under pressure without discarding the system and trying another after every crisis, as have Italy and Germany, France and Spain,” she wrote. Then she suggested such protection could soon give way: “Under accelerating incompetence in America, this may change. Social systems can survive a good deal of folly when circumstances are historically favorable, or when bungling is cushioned by large resources or absorbed by sheer size as in the United States during its period of expansion. Today, when there are no more cushions, folly is less affordable.”

For all her prescience, it seems likely that Tuchman, who died in 1989, would have been stunned by the Brobdingnagian dimensions of American folly during the last six years. Just over 20 years after she wrote about the Constitution’s miraculous endurance, it’s hard to figure out how much of the democratic republic created by our founders still exists, and how long what’s left will last. The country (along with the world) is in terrible trouble, though the extent of that trouble is both so sprawling and multifaceted that it’s hard to get a hold on.

It’s not just that America is being ruled by small and venal men, or that its reputation has been demolished, its army overstretched, its finances a mess. All of that, after all, was true toward the end of Vietnam as well. Now, though, there are all kinds of other lurking catastrophes, a whole armory of swords of Damocles dangling over a bloated, dispirited and anxious country. Peak oil — the point at which oil production maxes out — seems to be approaching, with disastrous consequences for America’s economy and infrastructure. Global warming is accelerating and could bring us many more storms even worse than Katrina, among other meteorological nightmares. The spread of Avian Flu has Michael Leavitt, secretary of health and human services, warning Americans to stockpile canned tuna and powdered milk. It looks like Iran is going to get a nuclear weapon, and the United States can’t do anything to stop it. Meanwhile, America’s growing religious fanaticism has brought about a generalized retreat from rationality, so that the country is becoming unwilling and perhaps unable to formulate policies based on fact rather than faith.

At any time, of course, one can catalog apocalyptic portents and declare that the end is nigh. Obviously, things in America have been bad before — there has been civil war, depression, global conflagrations. The country seems to have exhausted its ability to elect decent leaders, but some savior could appear before 2008. One doesn’t want to be hysterical or give in to rampaging pessimism. Books about America’s decline in the face of an ascendant Japan filled the shelves in the 1980s, and a decade later, the country was at the height of power and prosperity.

Yet just because America has endured in the past does not mean it will in the future. Thus figuring out exactly how much danger we’re in is difficult. Are things really as dire as they seem, or are anxiety and despair just part of the cultural moment, destined to be as ephemeral as the sunny mastery and flush good times of the Clinton years? It’s human nature to believe that things will continue as they usually have, and that we’ll once again somehow stumble intact through our looming crises. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine a plausible scenario in which the country regains its equilibrium without first going through major convulsions.

So how scared should we be?

Kevin Phillips’ grim new book, “American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century,” puts the country’s degeneration into historical perspective, and that perspective is not conducive to optimism. The title is a bit misleading, because only the middle section of the book, which is divided into thirds, deals with the religious right. The first part, “Oil and American Supremacy,” is about America’s prospects as oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, and the last third, “Borrowed Prosperity,” is about America’s unsustainable debt. Phillips’ argument is that imperial overstretch, dependence on obsolete energy technologies, intolerant and irrational religious fervor, and crushing debt have led to the fall of previous great powers, and will likely lead to the fall of this one. It reads, in some ways, like a follow-up to “The March of Folly.”

“Conservative true believers will scoff: the United States is sue generis, they say, a unique and chosen nation,” writes Phillips. “What did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that He was apparently not added a further debilitating note to the later stages of each national decline.”

There’s a sad irony to the fact that Phillips has come to write this book. His 1969 book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” both predicted and celebrated Republican hegemony. As chief elections and voting patterns analyst for the 1968 Nixon campaign, he is often credited for the Southern strategy that led to the realignment of the Republican Party toward Sun Belt social conservatives. Today’s governing Republican coalition is partly his Frankenstein.

Phillips has been disassociating himself from the contemporary GOP for some time now — his last book, “American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush,” attacked the presidential clan as a corrupt threat to American democracy. His concern with the growing power of religious fundamentalism was evident then. As he wrote in the introduction, “Part of what restored the Bushes to the White House in 2000 through a southern-dominated electoral coalition was the emergence of George W. Bush during the 1990s as a born-again favorite of conservative Christian evangelical and fundamentalist voters. His 2001-2004 policies and rhetoric confirmed that bond. The idea that the head of the Religious Right and the President of the United States can be the same person is a precedent-shattering circumstance that had barely crept into national political discussion.”

Since then, there’s been much more attention paid to the role of evangelical Christians in the Republican Party. In “American Theocracy,” though, Phillips brings something important to the discussion — a global historical perspective on the relationship between growing religious zeal and the end of national greatness. “[T]he precedents of past leading world economic powers show that blind faith and religious excesses — the rapture seems to be both — have often contributed to national decline, sometimes even being in its forefront.”

To tell the story of the impending end of American supremacy, Phillips ranges through history and across subjects, going into detail about seemingly tangential matters like the production of whale oil in 17th century Holland. It can be a slog — Phillips is sometimes a dry writer who builds his arguments by slapping down numbers and statistics like a bricklayer. (At least he’s self-aware — at one point in his section on religion, he notes, “By this point the reader may feel baptized by statistical and denominational total immersion.”) Much of what he writes in individual chapters has been covered elsewhere in numerous books about peak oil, the religious right and economic profligacy.

But Phillips’ book is very valuable in the way he brings all the strands together and puts them in context. He has a history of good judgment that affords him the authority to make big-picture claims: In 1993, the New York Times Book Review wrote of him, “through more than 25 years of analysis and predictions, nobody has been as transcendentally right about the outlines of American political change as Kevin Phillips.” Other recent books foresee American meltdown; James Howard Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency” deals with some of the same gathering threats as “American Theocracy.” Kunstler is a far more engaging writer than Phillips, but he’s also more prone to doomsday speculation, and he sometimes seems to relish the apocalyptic scenario he conjures. It’s Phillips’ sobriety and gravitas that gives “American Theocracy” ballast, and that makes it frightening.

The first section, “Oil and American Supremacy,” covers the history of oil in American politics, both foreign and domestic, and what it means for America when oil starts running out. The subject of peak oil has been extensively covered elsewhere, yet it remains on the fringes of much of the political debate in America, despite its massive implications. Essentially, peak oil is the point at which more than half the earth’s available oil has been extracted. “After this stage, getting each barrel out requires more pressure, more expense, or both,” writes Phillips. “After a while, despite nominal reserves that may be considerable, more energy is required to find and extract a barrel of oil than the barrel itself contains.” Before that point comes, scarcity will drive prices to unheard-of levels. If that happens, the entire American way of life — the car culture, agribusiness, frequent air travel — will become untenable.

Experts differ about when we might pass the peak, but as Phillips notes, “even relative optimists see it only two or three decades away.” Unfortunately, the United States is uniquely unable to grapple with the mere idea of life after cheap gasoline, because the country’s entire sprawling infrastructure was built on the assumption that oil would remain plentiful. Writes Phillips, “[B]ecause the twenty-first-century United States has a pervasive oil and gas culture from its own earlier zenith — with an intact cultural and psychological infrastructure — it’s no surprise that Americans cling to and defend an ingrained fuel habit The hardening of old attitudes and reaffirmation of the consumption ethic since those years may signal an inability to turn back.”

The end of previous empires, Phillips explains, also corresponded with the obsolescence of their dominant energy source. The Netherlands was the “the wind and water hegemon” from 1590 to the 1720s. In the mid-18th century, Britain, harnessing the newly discovered power of coal, became the leading world power, only to be left behind by oil-fueled America. “The evidence is that leading world economic powers, after an energy golden era, lose their magic — and not by accident,” he writes. “The infrastructures created by these unusual, even quirky, successes eventually became economic obstacle courses and inertia-bound burdens.”

“American Theocracy’s” middle section deals with religion. Once again, the book’s value lies not in any new revelations — Phillips mostly relies on the work of other reporters and analysts — but in the context provided. In his sweeping overview, he misses some subtleties. He writes, for example, “Opponents of evolution — successful so far in parts of the South — are indeed busy trying to ban the teaching of it and textbooks that support it in many northern conservative or politically divided areas.” That’s not quite true — Darwin’s foes might dream of the day when he’s expunged from the schools, but right now, their focus is on having creationism or “intelligent design” taught alongside evolution, not in place of it.

That’s a relatively small point, but it’s indicative of the rather cursory treatment Phillips gives to the dynamics of the movement he decries. He’s much more interested in what it portends — a kind of soft theocracy that itself is an indication of an empire in decline. What he’s talking about is not a Christian version of Iran, but a country ruled by an evangelical party whose electoral machinery is integrated into a network of fundamentalist churches.

Again, the most fascinating part of this section lies in Phillips’ comparisons of America with past global powers — the intolerance of Christian Rome, the militant, expansionist Catholicism of 17th century Spain, the theocratic Calvinism of the mid-18th century Netherlands and the evangelical enthusiasms of Victorian Britain. Toward the end of the Netherlands’ worldwide dominance, he writes, “Dutch Reformed pastors called for national renewal and incessantly attacked laziness, prostitution, French fashions, immigrants and homosexuals.”

Phillips’ final section, about national debt and the increasingly insubstantial nature of the United States economy, follows the model of the rest of the book, offering a summary of others’ research on the subject, followed by historical analysis. What concerns Phillips here is not just the country’s staggering national debt — although that concerns him plenty — but also the shift from a manufacturing to a financial-services economy, which he calls financialization. Instead of making things, Americans increasingly make money by moving money around. Finance, he writes, “fattened during the early 2000s — this notwithstanding the 2000-2002 collapse of the stock market bubble — on a feast of low interest enablement, credit-card varietals, exotic mortgages, derivatives, hedge-funded strategies, and structured debt instruments that would have left 1920s scheme meister Charles Ponzi in awe.”

Unless the United States proves immune from the economic laws that have heretofore prevailed, this arrangement is unsustainable. As former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker wrote last April in the Washington Post, under the placid surface of the seemingly steady American economy, “there are disturbing trends: huge imbalances, disequilibria, risks — call them what you will. Altogether the circumstances seem to me as dangerous and intractable as any I can remember, and I can remember quite a lot. What really concerns me is that there seems to be so little willingness or capacity to do much about it.”

Again, as Phillips shows, the historical record provides warnings: “Historically, top world economic powers have found ‘financialization’ a sign of late-stage debilitation, marked by excessive debt, great disparity between rich and poor, and unfolding economic decline.”

Looking at the possible crises facing the country, Phillips writes of the “potential for an incendiary convergence if — a big if, to be sure — several of the worry-wart camps prove to be correct  I can’t remember anything like this multiplicity of reasonably serious calculations and warnings. It is as if the United States, like the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ‘One-Hoss Shay,’ is about to lose all its wheels at once.”

For someone who is profoundly uneasy about America’s future right now, there’s something perversely comforting about reading this from a figure like Phillips. It suggests that one’s enveloping sense of foreboding is based on something more than the psychological stress of living under the Bush kakistocracy. A feeling that the world is falling apart is usually associated with neurosis; now, it’s possible that it’s a sign of sanity.

But if Phillips is correct, the coming years are going to be ugly for all of us, not just blithe exurbanites with SUVs and floating-rate mortgages. With oil growing scarce and America unable or unwilling to even begin weaning itself away, we could see a future of resource wars that would inflame jihadi terrorism and bankrupt the country, shredding what’s left of the social safety net. As Phillips notes, a collapsed economy would leave many debt-ridden Americans as what Democratic leaders have called “modern-day indentured servants,” paying back constantly compounding debt with no hope of escape via bankruptcy. The prospect of social breakdown looms. The desperation of New Orleans could end up being a preview.

Desperate economic times are not good for democracy. The Great Depression, which ushered in the New Deal, was an anomaly in this regard. In an Atlantic Monthly article published last summer, the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman wrote, “American history includes several episodes in which stagnating or declining incomes over an extended period have undermined the nation’s tolerance and threatened citizens’ freedoms.” During the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s, when tens of thousands of families lost their land due to a combination of rising interest rates and falling crop prices, the Posse Comitatus, a far-right paramilitary network, made exceptional recruiting inroads. One poll had more than a quarter of Farm Belt respondents blaming “International Jewish bankers” for their region’s woes.

The right’s ideological infrastructure has only grown stronger since then. Kunstler may not have been exaggerating when he told Salon, “Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlements to a McHouse and a McCar.”

Eventually, like Spain, England and the Netherlands, the United States, shorn of imperial fantasy, may evolve into something better than what it is today. But terrible times seem likely to come first — years of fuel shortages, foreign aggression, millenarian madness and political demagoguery. A Democratic president could stop exacerbating the country’s problems and could reconcile with the rest of the world, but it’s unclear how much he or she could really turn things around. America’s economic and energy foundations are too badly eroded to be restored anytime soon. Besides, redistricting and the overrepresentation of rural states in the Senate mean that the GOP will remain powerful even if a decisive majority of Americans vote against it. Zealous conservatives in Congress and the media will almost certainly mount an assault on any future Democratic president just as they did on Bill Clinton. Governmental deadlock, as opposed to flagrant recklessness and misrule, is probably the best that can be hoped for, at least for the next few years.

In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, it was clear to everyone that the United States had suffered a hideous blow, but few had any idea just how bad it was. It didn’t occur to most people to wonder whether the country’s very core had been seriously damaged; if anything, America had never seemed so united and resolute. Almost five years later, with Bush still in the White House, a whole cavalcade of catastrophes bearing down on us and a lack of political will to address any of them, the scope of Osama bin Laden’s triumph is coming sickeningly into focus. He didn’t start the country on its march of folly, but he spurred America toward bombastic nationalism, military quagmire and escalating debt, all of which have made its access to the oil controlled by the seething countries of the Middle East ever more precarious. Now the United States is careening down a well-worn road faster than anyone could have imagined.

Claude Allen likes to talk about virtue and absolute standards. “I am proud to be part of an administration that is not afraid to say what is right and what is wrong,” he said at an abstinence conference in 2005. Educating kids about condoms, he said on another occasion, is “like telling your child, ‘Don’t use the car,’ but then leaving the keys in the Lamborghini and saying, ‘But if you do, buckle up.’”

How rich, then, to learn that this pious scold appears to be a compulsive thief. Allen submitted his resignation last month, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. But as the Chicago Tribune’s Washington blog, the Swamp, says, “It appears now that he may have been seeking more time with his defense attorney.” Allen, it seems, has been perpetrating petty scams at department stores, netting thousands of dollars.

The sordid story unspooled after Allen was caught at a Target in Gaithersburg, Md., allegedly stealing merchandise and then trying to return some of it for a refund. According to a press release from Maryland’s Montgomery County Police Department:

“The Target loss prevention manager contacted Montgomery County Police and, through the police investigation, it was learned that Allen had been receiving refunds in an amount exceeding $5,000 during last year. Some of the fraudulent returns were made at Target stores and some at Hecht’s stores. He would buy items, take them out to his car, and return to the store with the receipt. He would select the same items he had just purchased, and then return them for a refund. Allen is known to have conducted approximately 25 of these types of refunds, having the money credited to his credit cards.

“Throughout 2005, he obtained refunds for items ranging from clothing, a Bose theater system, stereo equipment and [a] photo printer to items valued only at $2.50.”

Why would Allen do this? A former lawyer at the ultra-powerful firm of Baker & Botts, he has plenty of money — according to the New York Times, in October 2005 he bought a new house for $958,300. But the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention explains that for “almost all non-professional shoplifters, stealing from stores is basically a reflection of a person’s ability (or inability) to cope with a multitude of situations in his or her life … In addition to feeling good, shoplifters quickly observe this ‘high’ temporarily eliminates their feelings of anger, frustration, depression or other unhappiness in their life. Realizing how easy it is to get that ‘high’ feeling, they are pulled toward doing it again … ‘just one more time’ … and their addiction begins to develop.”

Like his fellow ideologues William Bennett and Rush Limbaugh, then, Allen seems to be a sick man. One wonders whether, after this, he’ll still push an approach to AIDS and STD prevention based entirely on the impulse-controlling powers of faith.

This item has been corrected since it was first posted.