In President Trump's recent 60 Minutes interview – more of a cross-examination than an interview – Lesley Stahl asked him if he could characterize his supporters. He replied that they are, "People that love our country more than anything else. And they like to see our country thrive."
It is surprising that Democrats no longer seem to recognize there is still a large market for patriotism. Every day now, Democrats cater more and more to the market for contempt toward America. That does not mean all Joe Biden supporters loathe America. There are certainly Democrats who love their nation. But a far greater proportion of voters on the Left clearly loathe America. You don't roam the streets looting and burning when you love your community and nation. When you love your community and nation, you don't call police officers pigs, and riot to abolish law enforcement. Those actions are clearly driven by loathing.
In a speech earlier this week, Joe Biden condemned the latest violence and looting in Philadelphia, but then said, "Much of it [the violence] is a cry for justice." If Joe Biden is correct in that assessment, it is a tragic commentary on just how far out of love the Left has fallen with their nation. Because in America's past, looting stores and setting fire to buildings with people inside is not how serious citizens worked to achieve any kind of justice. It also demonstrates how sadly deficient their history education is that they do not see how radically different, and far more effective, the nonviolent Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was under Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership. How are you achieving any justice when every act of burning and looting just creates more victims of injustice?
"Death to America" used to be the go-to cliché ringing out from the streets of Tehran. But this year it has been heard in Portland and Kenosha. It is the pathetic culmination of a half-century of neo-Marxist indoctrination of generations of Americans through our institutions of "higher learning." The 1960s Marxist rebels did not achieve their desired revolution in the U.S., so they became college professors instead. For decades, they methodically fed their anti-American poison to gullible captive audiences of students, brain-washing a new and larger subversive army than they were able to muster in the Sixties. Now that poison has seeped into every corner of our educational system, so that anti-American sentiment is more the rule than the exception.
It is a frightening, anti-American sentiment we've not seen on this level before.The combination of COVID-19, economic meltdown, and the George Floyd tragedy created the neo-Marxists' ideal concoction – the opportunity to pin everything on the false narrative that America's only real sin is white supremacy. Just like original Marxism which reduced all of human history to a struggle between the working class and the evil capitalist overlords, and just like Nazism which blamed all German problems on Jews, Anti-racism is a quasi-religion that pins America's problems on the white man. It is an absurd, bigoted, ignorant conclusion, but it sells in the large segment of America that is riddled with cancer from ingesting the 1960s-neo-Marxist poison.
America has had plenty of contentious presidential elections before. Sometimes your preferred candidate wins, sometimes they lose, but we agree to disagree and move on. Ultimately, we get back to our lives after an election, trusting the Constitutional design of our system will balance things out so that no presidential administration can lead the nation too far off the deep end. But this time there is something much more sinister emanating from the Left – this idea that after President Biden ascends to his rightful throne, Americans who dared vote for Trump must be taken to the woodshed and taught a lesson, so they never utter a political opinion again. It is a frightening, anti-American sentiment we've not seen on this level before. Again, this sentiment represents an unprecedented loathing of America and of the classical liberal tradition of our political debate.
Over the past 244 years, most Americans have seen their share of garbage on our shores – greed, injustice, corruption, disastrous foreign entanglements, racism, and on and on the list goes. Most Americans have experienced this garbage in one form or another yet still said, "So you're saying there's a chance." In spite of the obstacles, most Americans choose to believe there is still a chance with America, a chance of doing better personally, and as a nation. That prospect has always fueled the American people. But it doesn't mean it always will. Ultimately, it is a choice – to love or to loathe our country. And only one of those choices provides the catalyst to continue improving the American experiment, while protecting the key principles that made it exceptional in the first place.