American Review
American Review is published daily on the internet and as a quarterly on our iPad app. It is published by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Founded in 2006, the Centre's mission is to increase understanding of the United States in Australia.
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With seemingly nothing beyond the pale for Republicans where contraceptive and reproductive rights are concerned, Nicole Hemmer wonders what Todd Akin did differently:
Why did the GOP unite so solidly against Akin, while letting other offenders off?
It wasn’t his affronts to women or science or the Romney campaign. It was that Akin made his remarks while he could still be replaced, and Republicans saw an opportunity to salvage a winnable Senate seat.
Sound cynical? Consider the following:
- Akin’s position on abortion matches the GOP platform. Akin holds that no woman should have access to abortion even in cases of rape. That may seem like a fringe position, but since 1984 the party’s platform has included support of the Human Life Amendment, which would outlaw abortion and makes no exception for rape or incest.
- Republican legislators already differentiate types of rape in abortion policy. Okay, Akin isn’t going to win any support with the phrase “legitimate rape”. But the idea behind it — that the type of rape matters — has the backing of several prominent Republicans. High on the list? Vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, who co-sponsored a “forcible rape” bill with Akin. They added the word “forcible” to a bill concerning insurance coverage of abortion procedures. The language meant that victims of statutory rape would not be covered.
- The Republican Party is a science-free zone. Akin’s belief in the magical properties of the female body leaves him — and his party — open to ridicule. But that’s not a deal-breaker in today’s GOP, where presidential candidates hesitate to embrace evolution or climate change. Even Ronald Reagan once said trees cause pollution. Scientific literacy is not a prerequisite for electability or popularity in the Republican Party.
- Side-tracking the Romney campaign isn’t cause for resignation. Otherwise Romney would have had to abandon the ticket ages ago. The Massachusetts governor steps on his own message at least once a week. He did it again on Friday with a joke about the President’s birth certificate. The campaign spent the rest of the day answering questions about birthers rather than the economy.
More fascinating is the federalism of the system, which looks something like a cross between American federalism and the structure of the 19th century American political parties. Churches are grouped into conferences, with each conference headed by an elected bishop. The conferences serve as provincial governments. Each conference has an annual meeting (confusingly called the annual conference), which is attended by all pastors and an equal number of delegates elected by the individual churches and which serves as the legislative session for the year — ordaining clergy, setting budgets, goals, and policies. And, of course, every four years, the annual conference selects delegates to the national general conference. The general conference — the meeting of the national legislature — is the only entity that can make general policy (theological, governance, or otherwise) for the church.
Matt Glassman, who also includes an H.L. Mencken quote:
Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
At The Nation, historian Rick Perlstein says that he can sum up his books in four words: “Republicans, crazy; Democrats, stupid.”
My new piece at American Review could, in one sense, be read as concern trolling, but it wasn’t written in that spirit. Springing off the Joe Ricketts story, it’s a discussion of how so many Republican electioneering attempts thus far in the campaign have been targeted against the president as conservatives imagine him to be, which, I believe, is something different to how the rest of America sees its president.
I find the conservative take on Obama, and the Obama presidency, rather interesting. Not so much the really out there stuff — birtherism, Kenyan anti-colonialism, etc. — but the things that run-of-the-mill base members believe. What makes it all such a mess is the overlap between the right wing fringe and the Republican mainstream, and how difficult it is to separate the two. For instance, many conservatives believe Obama is a dunce (the teleprompter, the idea that he relied on affirmative action for his education) and an arrogant fraud (the “celebrity” thing). Undoubtedly that’s a belief that, for a lot of people, is motivated by uncomplicated racism — but for many others it arises from a sincere failure to understand the appeal of the man or his policies, and so, to these folks, accusations of racism look like an attempt to silence criticism of the president.
I’m also fascinated by the constant accusations on the right that Obama has wantonly disregarded the Constitution. That’s because those accusations are so similar in tone to the ones the left made against George W. Bush in his presidency. I’m not going to fall into the trap of false equivalency: the left had an immeasurably better case than the right does. And though some of the right’s criticisms are grounded in fair concerns about the Administration’s foreign policy and anti-terror tactics, for the most part, they’re fairly groundless. But then, perhaps the left mixed in a lot of groundless accusations against the Bush administration along with its multitude of very real concerns?
The reason this happens is that America is a nation founded on an idea*. The only problem is that no one in America can agree on what that idea is, although they all think they’re personal conception of the idea is a universal one. And there’s a widespread belief that the Constitution is a pretty good attempt at capturing the idea. (The Declaration of Independence is an even better one.) So if you’re someone for whom the policies of a president like Barack Obama do not accord with your ideas of what America should be, then it makes sense that you will consider them in breach of the Constitution — the document that explains what America should be.
Anyway, this is venturing into territory I haven’t fully thought through. But my column is here. Read!
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*This is a piece of American exceptionalism of which I firmly believe the truth. I can think of few other nations to which this applies; the states of the old world are ethnic entities, while few new world nations share such ideological origins. Australia, for instance, was founded out of a desire to preserve the colonial outpost’s Britishness, and we’ve spent our entire history trying to imagine what being Australian might be. See here for more of my discussion on this.
![“The Internet will be forever grateful for the introduction of the term ‘black metrosexual Abraham Lincoln’.”
Right you are, Adam Serwer (“Jeremiah Wright is Not the Silver Bullet”).
[Slate video screengrab from here]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m47681N9LX1rog49bo1_500.jpg)
“The Internet will be forever grateful for the introduction of the term ‘black metrosexual Abraham Lincoln’.”
Right you are, Adam Serwer (“Jeremiah Wright is Not the Silver Bullet”).
[Slate video screengrab from here]
The Hamiltonians are nationalist — they see the nation as more important than the states and the cities, which are just components. Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, through even to Eisenhower and Nixon, want government, business and banking to collaborate often on a very large scale for national economic development. And in different periods they are denounced by the left or the right or the center — so this isn’t a liberal or conservative thing.
The Jeffersonian vision is not a vision of an unregulated free market; it’s a vision of local communities made up of small banks, small businesses and small government. And so the Jeffersonians, a category which includes William Jennings Bryan in the late 19th century and a lot of populist conservatives today, are perfectly willing to have the government intervene to protect small businesses and small banks against big businesses and big banks. One of the major forms of protectionism and privilege throughout American history — which continues today — is the popularity of special privileges for small businesses, even though they may be very inefficient from a Hamiltonian point of view in terms of the national economy.
