WAIT, ALL THE BEST PEOPLE TOLD ME THAT SORT OF THING WAS THE LAST REFUGE OF A SCOUNDREL: Are Democrats patriots?

By putting love of America front and center, Trump lured the Left into revealing their utter contempt for American values and Americans. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion curricula exploded into the classrooms, the New York Times went all in on the 1619 Project, which argued that the real American founding was in 1619, not 1776, because that is when the first African slaves were imported to America. They got a Pulitzer for this widely discredited dreck.

The Left’s critique went from “we can do better” to the more explicit: America sucks and always has. And anybody who took issue with that view was labeled a racist–or worse, a domestic terrorist. The National School Boards Association called on the Biden Administration to investigate parents as terrorists and even suggested calling out the National Guard.

The backlash was intense, and rightly so. But it also revealed something fundamental about the way the Leftist establishment views its role in society: to be the revolutionary vanguard against the normies among us who are so very very deplorable.

So yes, I think that the Left has no right to claim patriotism, because the Left doesn’t like America. And by that I don’t mean that they think America needs reform–any rational person could name a thousand things we could do better. We can debate policies all day long and all agree at the end of the day that America is both great and that it could be even greater. That is what living in a republic is all about.

Back during the Dubya era, Ace of Spades once defined the left’s love of country as being from the “Ike Turner school of patriotism:” “Those who love America show it by denigrating and beating the shit out of her at every opportunity.”

In that sense, very little has changed amongst the left’s worldview.