Conservatives Are Increasingly Anti-America
Wait. What?
by Evan Urquhart
Free market capitalism. Low taxes. Christian values. Guns. And… Anti-American sentiments? We don’t expect the last item on this list to go with the rest when we think about American conservatism. But while conservatives are still quick to accuse the left (and even the center) of being anti-American or hating America, the contradiction of claiming to love a country while hating its actual people and their actual values has begun to take a toll. This is well demonstrated in a syndicated essay by conservative talk radio personality Dennis Prager entitled “What nation exports the most destructive ideas? America.”
The thesis of this essay is simple: The existence of trans people is so terrible that Prager’s once steadfast patriotism is wavering. Here's it is in his own words:
For the patriotically inclined, one wouldn’t think that love for a country whose founding documents enshrined the right of members of one race to brutally enslave another, where women were denied the right to vote for 144 years, and who has a history of working to overthrow democratically elected governments abroad that is not only deeply shameful, but continues unabated to this day, would dissipate because a handful of people think differently about whether a person’s gender is fixed at birth. But that would be wrong. It’s not just Prager: The belief in America’s decline and the willingness to look towards Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary, and even Britian’s socialized NHS as a model for how America seems to be popping up more and more often in conservative thought.
Don’t get it twisted: Patriotism is bad. It’s an excuse to turn off critical thinking and stifle dissent and it lends itself to abhorrent, unjustifiable wars. However it is destabilizing to see how hatred for trans people and other minorities is so all-consuming on the right that they would turn against the country they profess to love. Slogans like “America love it or leave it” and “America right or wrong” which many people grew up hearing have only ever applied to other people. Conservatives feel fully within their rights to destroy the country if they can’t have everything they want, all the time.