“My-country’s-better-than-your-country” is not a foreign policy. It’s a playground taunt. But this childish idea is the basis of American exceptionalism. The concept is that the United States is not simply an exceptional nation in this regard or that, but the exception to all others, at all times and in all ways. The difference is categorical: America is the chosen nation. American exceptionalism is religious and extremist by its very nature. The ideology does not permit any other nation even to aspire to be on par with the new Canaan. Congressman Paul Broun, Jr., unexceptional in so many ways, is a steadfast American exceptionalist.

Broun has written or signed onto a number of bills whose only goal is to slash federal discretionary spending in order to maintain or increase current military spending. Broun believes that the globe’s only exceptional nation, the one blessed by God, should, of course, have the capacity to decimate all the others. Given that the United States already spends more than all other nations on Earth combined on its military and war-making, it seems more than a little bloodthirsty to slight children’s healthcare and unemployment assistance to make more room for aircraft carriers and nukes whose tactical values are based on a Cold War calculus. Broun and his ultra-conservative pals have even tried to peg military spending to GDP to provide a floor under which war spending could not fall. Deriding the wisdom of George Washington, who warned against any standing American army, Broun would like nothing more than to create a fully militarized United States, armed to the teeth and trigger-happy.

But what about foreigners we’re not allowed to shoot? No bomb has yet been invented which selectively targets Mexicans or Salvadorans. Broun, thus, has tried almost everything else available to punish impoverished immigrants from countries to our south. For example, Broun recently introduced HR 1621, a nightmare of a bill which seeks to withhold federal funds from any school which allows for the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in any language other than English. For a guy who has compared Obama to Hitler, it’s more than a little ironic that HR 1621 relies on Broun’s belief that “the government may, from time to time, take steps to reinforce national unity.” Broun’s wish to educationally and materially abuse the children of immigrants in the interest of “national unity” is textbook “us” versus “them” politics. One doesn’t have to listen hard for the subtext: The purity of the homeland must be defended against the Others whose very presence introduces, in Broun’s words, a “corrupting influence on our society.” As always, Broun casts the debate in the vague terms of a metaphysical battle in which heritage and purity are threatened by a corrupting evil. Never mind the hemispheric political economy which creates the conditions for widespread emigration. Never mind that the sort of trade policies Broun supports—those which allow corporations to freely hopscotch national borders in search of cheap labor—hopelessly trap the underpaid workers behind borders they cannot cross.

Sanctity of Life: Until Birth

For Broun, life begins at conception—even for immigrants. Broun cares deeply for the life of the unborn child. He largely ceases to care for that life, however, once it is born. While Broun sponsors bill after bill to protect the microscopic morulae, blastulae and metastacizing trophoblasts of the human gestation process, he really couldn’t care less about what happens once the baby is born into poverty. Broun offered a bill this year asserting that the “right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being, and is the paramount and most fundamental right of a person.” But Broun’s sanctimonious concern evaporates as soon as the child is born and the matter leaves the lofty realm of ideology and religion. Life is messy, and Broun’s absolutism is better suited to pretending things about a zygote that cannot be seen.

Though recently proposing the anti-abortion “Sanctity of Human Life Act,” Broun voted multiple times to deny health care to millions of American infants and children by rejecting the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, a federal program which funds state programs like Georgia’s PeachCare. Meanwhile, the infant mortality rate in America is a shameful 46th in the world, as measured by the CIA. In the severe deprivation of the inner city and of poor rural areas, that number is much higher. While many low-income, minority urban areas in the United States show infant mortality rates the same as Mexico and Thailand, health experts find that some inner cities show rates on par with Third World nations such as Kazakhstan and Zimbabwe. To allow a child to die in the richest nation on earth can be thought of as a very late-term abortion, the sort of abortion Dr. Broun is content to legislatively administer.

In addition to protecting the sanctity of life (while promoting totally needless, bloody wars), Broun is into protecting the sanctity of marriage. His extremely selective reading of the Bible has led him to the belief that it is the government’s business how its citizens choose to live. Broun recently introduced a bill to create a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. In typical Broun fashion, the bill seeks the “protection” of marriage, as though allowing homosexuals the full rights of citizenship would simultaneously destroy conventional marriage. Apparently Broun didn’t get the news: Marriage has been anything but sacred in America for some time now, with divorce rates twice what they were in the 1950s and ’60s. Billboards in Atlanta advertise divorces at Sam’s Club-type discounts. Reality TV shows feature surreal contests in which spouses are selected by the crudest of criteria. It is still possible to acquire a mail-order bride in the country that invented the concept. Broun’s crusade to “protect” marriage is quixotic at best, hateful at worst.

Onward, Christian Soldier

There’s a country pulpit somewhere just aching for Broun’s moralizing. A wild-eyed congregation awaits his clumsy philosophies and premonitions, his notions of purity and warnings of barbarians at the gates. But Broun is a United States Congressman, and his absolutist tendencies do little to enhance constructive debate in Washington. It’s all religion to Broun, a pure order for which rational debate is useless. Faith, whether in a god or an ideology, doesn’t require evidence—that’s sort of the point. A member of Congress, though, is called to help steer the nation according to facts on the ground, not whims of the heavens. There is a time and place for religion, but as our founders so wisely determined, the business of government is not it. Still, Broun’s first allegiance is to his beliefs, however much they stand in conflict with the founders’ ideals. It is difficult to imagine that, even if placed in the Oval Office tomorrow, Broun would abandon his theocratic ideals and execute the office in accord with the founders’ principles.

And that’s exactly why it is worrisome that Broun might have aspirations beyond his current station. Broun’s penchant for self-promotion, whether through his countless campaign mailings or increasingly frequent television appearances, is the sign of sights set higher, either within the Republican Party or perhaps in an office above that of Representative. Broun seeks to be an active agent in the war for control of the GOP, a battle that pits electoral-success-minded Republicans against the hard-line likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and, well, Rep. Broun. Though it would reduce the party to a sad shadow of its former self, the hardliners want to fundamentalize the GOP, to strip reason and rationality from the party whose historical claim has always been its logical—as opposed to “bleeding heart”—basis. Are we watching in Broun the birth of a new conservatism, one that follows—at whatever distance—the Middle East’s model of dogmatic, faith-based parties? Or are we witnessing in our very own congressman the death rattle of an ideology whose day is done?

Matt Pulver