Manifest Destiny

Who, centuries ago, would have named the English language and the English-speaking peoples as Most Likely to Succeed? Why is it not, say, German culture rather than American that saturates the globe? Why not Japanese, or Spanish, or French? How to account for the dominance of English as the language of the world's elites, or for the military/industrial/financial pre-eminence that, after two world wars, passed from the British Empire to the Americans?

In The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (Basic Books; 707 pages; $32.50) Kevin Phillips fetches back 3 1/2 centuries for a complex, ingeniously woven explanation. His thesis, mostly persuasive, is that the English-speaking world prospered as it has because in three internecine conflicts (the English Civil Wars of the 17th century, the 18th century's American Revolution, and the 19th century's American Civil War) it hammered itself into new political, cultural and religious shapes that gave the Anglo cousinhood both energy and stability: "Broadly, the result was to uphold political liberties, commercial progress, technological inventiveness, linguistic ambition, and territorial expansion."

At first The Cousins' Wars seems a surprising book from Phillips, whose field until now has been contemporary American politics. He began his career with The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), which predicted the coming of a new dominant conservative coalition oriented to the South and Southwest. But over the years Phillips has pioneered a kind of complexity theory of political trends. He has trained his eye as a multidimensional optic that builds its big picture from the sort of clues (cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, economic, sectional and local) that any competent state party chairman knows more or less by instinct, but that scholars or political journalists may be too impatient--or too grandly focused--to grasp.

The Cousins' Wars makes a daringly bulky package of history. In busy conversational style Phillips bustles about his enormous thesis, rechecking the ropes and knots with which he has bound it. If he finds a knot he thinks too loose, he reties it three or four times. The result is fussy but immensely impressive.

Through three wars and almost four centuries, the English-speaking peoples organized, across the alienating-yet-binding space of the Atlantic, a dynamic of entanglement and change that both invigorated and, by stages, freed them. Phillips writes, "Each conflict--and all three of them combined revolution and civil war--rescripted society, economics, and government on both sides of the ocean." Thus, for example, the American Civil War resolved--the hard way--the problem of slavery. Put the three wars together, as Phillips does, and you see that they "constitute the central staircase of modern English-speaking history, not least the division into two great powers with pointedly different characteristics--not sister or brother nations, but cousins. However unforeseen, this duality proved to be the Anglo-American genius."

Polarizations formed on either side of the grand duality of England vs. America, Old World vs. New. Thus on either side of the Atlantic, political, cultural and religious opposites were, in each of the three wars, slugging it out: "From the seventeenth century, the English-speaking peoples on both continents defined themselves by wars that upheld, at least for a while, a guiding political culture of a Low Church, Calvinistic Protestantism, commercially adept, militantly expansionist, and highly convinced, in Old World, New World, or both, that it represented a chosen people and a manifest destiny. In the full, three-century context, Cavaliers, aristocrats, and bishops pretty much lost and Puritans, Yankees, self-made entrepreneurs, Anglo-Saxon nationalists, and expansionists had the edge, especially in America."

Phillips tells us that what drove him four years ago to this larger historical subject was his disgust with the squalor and venality of American politics. (One wonders what he thinks about re-emerging from his studies at the present moment.) He has returned not only with a handsome thesis but also with a thousand oddments and curios he collected along the way--such as remarks by Charles Kingsley, the Cambridge University historian who served as chaplain to Queen Victoria. Kingsley, visiting Ireland in the 1840s, described the Irish as a biological subspecies: "I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country." It is Phillips' larger thesis that all the English-speaking peoples, including the Kingsleys, have evolved admirably since those times.