Comments on: The Americanist Heresy Revisited

By: Rowan

Rowan — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:15:58 +0000

I’m sure there have been personality-driven politics before. Perhaps it’s more the nature of the change in celebrity. I’m not going to go crazy trying to determine when the cause was.

And I’m not saying that the Birfers are equal to liberals who thought Bush wasn’t elected. I’m saying they end up with a similar effect: a significant portion of the population has a reason (good or otherwise, institutional or otherwise) to believe that the President is not really the President.

What they do after that belief depends more on their political viewpoints than that they have the belief.

By: Norwegian Shooter

Norwegian Shooter — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:47:29 +0000

Rowan, I’m afraid I have to disagree again.

First, politics is always personality driven – especially in a system with a president. Wasn’t there a cult of personality around Andrew Jackson?

Second, there is absolutely no equivalence to outrage over Bush v. Gore and the Clinton/Obama haters. There was no aura of violence around angry Dems, and they received little, if any, institutional support from the Democratic establishment.

By: Sean S.

Sean S. — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:01:14 +0000

Guess what Mitt Romney’s new book is going to be titled? “”No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.” You can’t make these sorts of things up.

By: forestwalker

forestwalker — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:06:01 +0000

The meaning of the words “racist” and “racism” in popular discourse have slipped so badly that I’ve come to expect any argument applying them as labels to be pretty muddle-headed.

By: Aziz Poonawalla

Aziz Poonawalla — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:54:20 +0000

mea culpa:

http://blog.beliefnet.com/cityofbrass/2009/08/apology-to-daniel-larison.html

By: Rowan

Rowan — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:48:15 +0000

I see the Flat Birthers as an offshoot of the modern politics of presidential personality. I’m not sure entirely when it started – the advent of television/JFK is my best theory – but politics in this country has come to be based about the president, his personality, his history, occasionally his policies, but most importantly, his party.

This took its most current form during the Clinton years, as his opponents moved from opposing his policies and attempting to defeat him in elections, to actively attempting to remove him as the legitimate president while he was sitting.

In the second set of Bush years, the Democratic personality-followers had it even easier. Dubious, too-close elections made it easy to claim that Bush was illegitimate, that he wasn’t actually the president in any way – Gore was.

The Birthers are a continuation of that. Without a close election to use to question Obama’s legitimacy, they’ve taken to questioning his birth. Remember also, for that brief day around the inauguration, when John Roberts’ line flub meant that Obama hadn’t actually taken the oath of office, and semi-jokingly, the personality-following Republicans claimed that meant he wasn’t really president.

It’s less an attempt to actually get rid of Obama (do they really want Biden?) and more of the mirror image of the liberals saying “he’s not MY president!”