The Distortions and Realities of the Senate’s Constitutional Purpose: Setting the Record Straight on “Senate Exceptionalism”

The Forum ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Wirls
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
University Of Virginia ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Do So

Abstract Drawing on part of the argument from my recent book, The Senate: From White Supremacy to Government Gridlock (University of Virginia Press, 2021), I critique what I call “Senate exceptionalism:” the notion that the Senate is the framers’ particularly special or remarkable creation. I do so by contrasting the historical and constitutional distortions that support this institutional conceit with the realities of the founding and American political development. After reviewing the parallels between the ideas and tenets of American and Senate exceptionalism, I introduce four arguments from the book that undermine the basis of the Senate’s exceptionalism and in particular draw critical attention to the constitutional mythology surrounding and supporting the filibuster in the form of Senate Rule XXII and its three-fifths supermajority threshold for ending debate on many matters before the Senate.

Structure, Sequence, and Subordination in American Political Culture: What's Traditions Got to Do with It?

1996 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 470-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Orren
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Science Review ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
Science Review ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Short Space ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
Do So

Rogers Smith's American Political Science Review article, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions of America,” poses challenging substantive and methodological questions for the study of American political development. Whether or not it intended to do so, the article has struck a chord in several programs of research. The following colloquy between Smith and me centers on Smith's reading of political culture in terms of “traditions.” In a spirit of advancing our common enterprise, I have sharpened rather than muted the differences between Smith's views and my own in order to bring them into relief in a short space.

Reconsideration of the Research Trajectory on the Carceral State

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-207
Author(s):  
Juliette Barbera
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Research Framework ◽  
Research Production ◽  
Fields Of Study ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
And Control

For decades, both incarceration and research on the topic have proliferated. Disciplines within the Western sciences have studied the topic of incarceration through their respective lenses. Decades of data reflect trends and consequences of the carceral state, and based on that data the various disciplines have put forth arguments as to how the trends and consequences are of relevance to their respective fields of study. The research trajectory of incarceration research, however, overlooks the assumptions behind punishment and control and their institutionalization that produce and maintain the carceral state and its study. This omission of assumptions facilitates a focus on outcomes that serve to reinforce Western perspectives, and it contributes to the overall stagnation in the incarceration research produced in Western disciplines. An assessment of the study of the carceral state within the mainstream of American Political Development in the political science discipline provides an example of how the research framework contributes to the overall stagnation, even though the framework of the subfield allows for an historical institutionalization perspective. The theoretical perspectives of Cedric J. Robinson reveal the limits of Western lenses to critically assess the state. The alternative framework he provides to challenge the limits imposed on research production by Western perspectives applies to the argument presented here concerning the limitations that hamper the study of the carceral state.

scholarly journals Just Mothering: Amy Coney Barrett and the Racial Politics of American Motherhood

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
H. Howell Williams
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
White Family ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Republican Motherhood ◽  
A Site ◽  
Confirmation Hearings

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination and confirmation featured frequent references to her role as a mother. This article situates these references within the trajectory of American political development to demonstrate how motherhood operates as a mechanism for enforcing a white-centered racial order. Through a close analysis of both the history of politicized motherhood as well as Barrett’s nomination and confirmation hearings, I make a series of claims about motherhood and contemporary conservatism. First, conservatives stress the virtuousness of motherhood through a division between public and private spheres that valorizes the middle-class white mother. Second, conservatives emphasize certain mothering practices associated with the middle-class white family. Third, conservatives leverage an epistemological claim about the universality of mothering experiences to universalize white motherhood. Finally, this universalism obscures how motherhood operates as a site in which power distinguishes between good and bad mothers and allocates resources accordingly. By attending to what I call the “republican motherhood script” operating in contemporary conservatism, I argue that motherhood is an ideological apparatus for enforcing a racial order premised on white protectionism.

Naturalizing affection, securing property: Family, slavery, and the courts in Antebellum South Carolina, 1830–1860

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Gwendoline M. Alphonso
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Development ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
White Male ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
White Family ◽  
Antebellum Period

Abstract The scholarship on race and political development demonstrates that race has long been embedded in public policy and political institutions. Less noticed in this literature is how family, as a deliberate political institution, is used to further racial goals and policy purposes. This article seeks to fill this gap by tracing the foundations of the political welding of family and race to the slave South in the antebellum period from 1830 to 1860. Utilizing rich testimonial evidence in court cases, I demonstrate how antebellum courts in South Carolina constructed a standard of “domestic affection” from the everyday lives of southerners, which established affection as a natural norm practiced by white male slaveowners in their roles as fathers, husbands, and masters. By constructing and regulating domestic affection to uphold slavery amid the waves of multiple modernizing forces (democratization, advancing market economy, and household egalitarianism), Southern courts in the antebellum period presaged their postbellum role of reconstructing white supremacy in the wake of slavery's demise. In both cases the courts played a formative role in naturalizing family relations in racially specific ways, constructing affection and sexuality, respectively, to anchor the white family as the bulwark of white social and political hegemony.

Black Atlanta: An Ecosocial Approach to Narratives of the Atlanta Child Murders

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 194-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Gary Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Built Environments ◽  
Toni Cade Bambara ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Do So

Moving beyond ecocriticism, this essay argues that an ecosocial reading of narratives of the Atlanta child murders (1979–81) is better able to examine the sometimes functional, sometimes broken interactions between sociocultural circumstances and particular urban ecologies. Far from latching onto an idealized, utopian sense of a restorative natural world, the ecosocial approach introduced here focuses critical attention on the traumatized and traumatic social and cultural histories that play out in particular natural as well as built environments. In various ways, child-murders narratives by Toni Cade Bambara, Tayari Jones, and others bear the conflicting burdens of memory and forgetting, of old and new and never–changing and ever–changing Souths. They do so in large part by acknowledging ecosocial dysfunctions as one way of moving, however provisionally and problematically, toward a more grounded, more communal idea and practice of interrelatedness.

Letters to the Editors

1987 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 337-342
Author(s):  
Eric Monkkonen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
Local State ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political News ◽  
Island Communities ◽  
Over Time

Samuel Kernell's article “The Early Nationalization of Political News in America,” in Studies in American Political Development: An Annual (1986), 1: 255–78, raises issues that are at once interesting and puzzling. He measures the number and length of all political articles in leading Cleveland newspapers through the middle decades of the nineteenth century in order to ask about the amount of newspaper attention paid to local, state, and national political issues. He observes that local issues were predominant only very early in the nineteenth century and that they declined quickly over time. Kernell concludes that politics nationalized far earlier than historians like Robert Wiebe had ever thought. Wiebe's “island communities” were gone by 1845. It is a clever piece of research of substantial significance.

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