At First Things, Jody Bottum looks at Kevin Phillips’ new book and yearns for historical perspective:

But there was the New York Times proclaiming during the presidential campaign of 2004: “Never before have so many bishops so explicitly warned Catholics so close to an election that to vote a certain way was to commit a sin.” Does the Times really know nothing of the Know-Nothings’ anti-Catholic campaign of the 1856? Of Al Smith’s run in 1928? Of John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960?

Apparently not, for on Sunday the Times carried a long, glowing review of Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, the latest entry in the ongoing series of America-Is-Becoming-a-Religious-Dictatorship books. The review is like a parade of those who should know history better than this: if not the editors of the New York Times, then surely Kevin Phillips, who once wrote a very important political analysis called The Emerging Republican Majority, and if not Phillips, then at least the reviewer, Alan Brinkley, who is a senior professor of history and provost at Columbia University.

But no. All of them assert, for what must be partisan political reasons, that the republic is in peril from its historically unprecedented religious activists.