Santorum's "Issues" Page

jillyyfish:

interruptions:

Just look at what the #1 issue is on the page.

h/t ThinkProgress

This is beautiful. Also, I have honestly always thought that the phrase “American exceptionalism” was supposed to be pejorative. naïve much /:

The phrase has a weird etymology. Alexis de Tocqueville uses something close in Democracy in America in the course of explaining why we’re a bunch of uncultured brutes:

The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people, and attempt to survey them at length with their own features.

The phrase then shows up in the 20th century in the mouths of Communists:

Communists themselves in the 1920s talked of “American Exceptionalism”, the belief that thanks to its natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions, America might for a long while avoid the crisis that must eventually befall every capitalist society.

I think during the 60s it entered scholarly discourse in a pejorative/critical sense. But it enters the popular discourse in a big way in the 80s (in the same time frame as the whole Reaganite “City on a Hill” trope I’d bet):

Now a commitment to “American Exceptionalism” is a right-wing litmus test for the GOP nomination.

1. jillyyfish liked this
2. interruptions reblogged this from jillyyfish and added:

   The phrase has a weird etymology. Alexis de Tocqueville uses something close in Democracy in America in the course of...

3. jillyyfish reblogged this from interruptions and added:

   beautiful. Also, I have honestly always thought that...phrase “American exceptionalism”...

4. thatwasntveryclever liked this
5. antichrist-superuser reblogged this from so-meta
6. so-meta reblogged this from interruptions and added:

   thought of Santorum harping about things that contribute to misogyny

7. interruptions posted this