Talkin' About Politics: Do Liberals Hate America?

Do liberals hate America?

This question is probably one of the main tenets of modern (post-1950s) U.S.-style conservatism, especially after the dark Vietnam War-Watergate era.

Indeed, it’s probably one of the Big Three Myths that conservatives (especially the extremist right wing of the Republican Party and the Tea Party) hold dear.

(The other two Big Myths are What is good for General Motors is good for the country and Tax cuts for the wealthy benefit everyone eventually.)

While it is true that conservatism (and it doesn’t matter if it is Democratic Conservatism or Republican conservatism) has always sought to demonize liberals in other eras of history (the Big Business-GOP coalition resisted ex-President Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive ideas in the 1912 election and caused him to try for a second non-consecutive term of his own as a third party candidate…which he lost, big time; 20 years later, the same GOP-Big Business coalition called Franklin D. Roosevelt’s domestic agenda communistic and resisted it fiercely).

But this was nothing compared to the anti-liberal backlash that was openly supported (and secretly financed) by then-President Richard M. Nixon during his five years in the White House.

Now, it is unfortunately true that many young liberals, some of them still in high school even, behaved in a way that made conservatives believe that they did, indeed, hate America.

Many people, especially the men and women who had fought in World War II, looked at these scenes on a seemingly daily basis and thought, “My God! We didn’t fight the Nazis and the Japanese just so these kids could march down main street and burn their draft cards!”

And, of course, burning the U.S. flag in protests incensed conservatives (and even moderates), even though many judges ruled that such acts are Constitutionally-protected political statements.

Naturally, Nixon and his crew of dirty tricksters (Trump buddy Roger Stone was one of these) seized on these images of raggedy, long-haired, bearded and angry young men (and bra-less girls) and told their base: “See these kids? These liberal, Commie-supporting (and possibly Commie-led) troublemakers? They’re being paid by Moscow, Hanoi, Peking, and Havana to support the enemy and cause chaos in the U.S. They hate America!”

Nixon went so far as to get the very conservative New York City labor unions to carry out a violent counter-demonstration in Manhattan on May 8, 1970.

I don’t have the time or the inclination to describe the incident in this answer, but if you have never heard of the Hard Hat Riot, read about it here: Hard Hat Riot - Wikipedia

As you can see, the excesses of the anti-war movement, combined with clever Republican propaganda tactics that have been used since the 1968 elections, left a lasting impression on the conservative psyche.

Now, thus far I’ve explained why conservatives say that liberals hate America.

Conservatives, especially those that are willing to bend the truth so much that it looks like a pretzel, will say Liberals hate America till they turn blue.

Well, folks, it’s just not true.

Look. Conservatives and liberals both love America.

They just don’t agree on the role government plays in the everyday lives of Americans.

Conservatives believe that the role of the federal government is limited by the Constitution to:

• Protect the borders from an enemy attack and place limits on who can immigrate and who can’t
• Carry out foreign policy
• Maintain law and order
• Other than that, the central government can’t tell states what to do or let judges “legislate” from the bench (This argument was widely used by Southern states to defend Jim Crow laws during the Earl Warren Court years that spanned the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations)

Liberals believe that the government has a responsibility to ensure that every citizen has access to a decent public education, assistance for the disabled who cannot work, and equal protection under the law for everyone, no matter what color, national origin, gender, religion or sexual orientation.

There are other philosophical differences between conservatives and liberals, of course, and there are many areas in which their interests converge.

But if you want to know the biggest difference between liberals and conservatives, it boils down to this:

Liberals believe that changes in society and culture are inevitable. They embrace change, because as nice as it is to have traditions and a culture that can trace its steps to the Old World, not everything about our past was good and glorious. Slavery, child labor, child marriages, and racial segregation were once part of the national culture; do we really want them back?

Liberals clearly do not think that we need white supremacy, male domination of the culture, and unfair labor conditions to be part of modern American society. Nor do liberals believe that the wealthy classes should have more influence over government than ordinary citizens.

As I have written elsewhere (on Quora, if you must know), modern American conservatism resists progress as though it was fighting the Battle of the Bulge. Consider:

When Trump supporters say they want to make America great again, what they really mean is this:

• They want a return to the way things were in the immediate post-World War II era…where white males dominated the society and culture
• …women “knew their place” and either stayed home and raised the kids while the husbands worked, or they worked in professions that were geared exclusively for women (teaching, nursing, clerical/secretarial positions
• …minorities (blacks and Hispanics) also “knew their place,” not just in the Jim Crow South but also in segregated major league baseball (till 1947) and the military (also 1947)
• ….gays had no rights to speak of and had to stay “in the closet” or be beaten or even killed
• …America was the world’s biggest manufacturing country and largest exporter of finished goods, especially cars, planes, and consumer goods
• …multiculturalism did not exist

The problem with the MAGA principle is that the idyllic America of the 1950s simply was not as idyllic as they remember. People who wax nostalgic for The Leave it to Beaver/Father Knows Best seem to have forgotten:

• The Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s
• “Tail Gunner” Joe McCarthy and the excesses of the House Committee on Un-American Activities
• The unfairness of racial segregation under the Separate But Equal rule that kept white children and black children apart in public schools, especially in the South
• The “boys will be boys” attitude that allowed men to sexually harass women at the workplace with near impunity. This was such a “norm” in the culture that the trope of the lustful married boss chasing the sexy young secretary around the office was common in vaudeville and in Hollywood movies

In short, conservatives don’t like change. They resist progress, even if it is a futile effort, because they want society to remain static and unchanged. It doesn’t matter to them that the past is filled with ugliness, bigotry, and violence; they want time to stand still and to restore an Utopia that exists only in scripted sitcoms and their nostalgia-tinted memories.