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Those ideals being... what, exactly? Does it have any resemblance of a common culture, an actual community of common interest defined in some way other than GDP?
The problem with "far more likely to be critical" is that they seem to never find one godforsaken occasion to be positive.
I can't bring myself to entirely disagree, but you're hard pressed to find a group of similar scale that doesn't have such contempt and outright hate.
Edit:
On the topic of contempt and hate, there's a lot of wisdom in the old saw about the opposite of love being indifference, not hate, and I should've kept that in mind here. There is a corrosiveness to indifference and that may be one of the liberal's worst sins, that so many are unable to even recognize. It became too declassee to think that one's country and culture is something to be loved instead of apologized for.
Edit 2:
Ilhan Omar's infamous comments come to mind. And that is what people have in mind when they say liberals don't care about America.
I am not confident enough to define American in a way that I truly find acceptable, but in something of the spirit of Potter Stewart, I am not American in the way she is; if she has a definition at all, it is incompatible.
Liberty, Truth, Justice, the American Way, Human Rights, Democracy, Transgender For Everyone...
This what Scott Alexander coined the phrase "Blue Tribe" to refer to. American culture is not the Red Tribe. Plus, to be honest, I think there's just a general failure to model their adversaries' preferences on the part of right-wingers, where the weirdest, most idiosyncratic are assumed to stand in for the whole. Libs also like football, cars, car commercials featuring George Washington running over the British, and so on.
Most of them? The takeover of the American conservative movement by people who hate America and Americans is fairly recent. While they're playing on pre-existing sentiments, the severity of the rot comes from the top.
This is another failure to model liberals' beliefs/preferences, or why they have an issue with vulgar tribalism. It is not that there is nothing to be proud of - libs are happy to celebrate* the space program, WW2, the abolition of slavery, rock and roll, the civil rights movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US Olympic team etc... The disconnect is that they feel conservatives want to be proud of things that are shameful or whitewash sordid elements of the past.
*this list is not meant to be exhaustive; it's just stuff that popped into my head
Agreed.
It would be easier if they'd be honest about their preferences and the consequences thereof.
In theory, perhaps, or historically. Libs are at the forefront of the anti-moon crew. If you want to argue Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the New York Times aren't really libs, fine, but that's one of the flaws to the two-party system.
Being proud of WW2 is much more of a conservative dad or granddad thing; young libs don't even like Churchill.
The civil rights movement is the founding myth of modern liberal-progressives, yes; a magic they don't know how to recapture.
The primary example that comes to mind is, i repeat myself, Ilhan Omar. A hateful creep that has achieved wildly more success than she could have in her home country, and uses it primarily shit on the country that welcomed her and support the country she left. It is unfair to extend this to the whole of "the libs," of course; a lot of that is negativity bias. But "the libs" had years to come up with a good narrative about America already being great, and they fumbled it over and over because... I don't really know why. For the party that's supposed to be the smartest, most talented, chock full to the brim with marketers and storytellers, they really fell on their face against what shouldn't be that hard of a question.
Biden spent more time apologizing for calling a murderer the wrong euphemism than expressing sympathy for the victim! If that's what liberal tribalism and preferences get us, then I don't know what's worth redeeming there.
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The takeover of the American conservative movement by people who find the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South fundamentally sympathetic (not all of whom are white supremacists or white nationalists themselves - Buckley probably was but Goldwater and Reagan definitely weren't) never happened because the modern American conservative movement was founded by people who found the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South fundamentally sympathetic. (The American conservative movement is not the same thing as the GOP).
The sort of people who find the Confederacy sympathetic have never been particularly fond of "America" the actually-existing political entity between the Rio Grande and the 49th parallel, or its government, or its damnyankee ruling class, or its urban middle class with its dastardly (i.e. secular) booklarning. (Buckley, for instance, comes out against all of these things in the 1950s). What is fairly recent is that this has boiled over in a way which makes "hate" a plausible descriptor. Or, more correctly, boiled over again given the unfortunate incident in the 1860s.
Sure, but in this case the actors are both contradicting themselves.
Currently, the "conservatives" (as they call themselves- I call them traditionalists, as they have conserved nothing) might be sympathetic to the Confederacy as an axiom, but are acting like Unionists right now with all the anti-slavery stuff.
This is in stark contrast to the "progressives" (as I call them- they call themselves 'liberals', but that's just stolen valor), which are existentially hostile to the Confederacy, but are indistinguishable from Confederates right now with all the "don't take our slaves away"/"State's Rights [to keep slaves]" stuff.
So you have a situation where the founding myths are contradicted on both sides: that the Union was bad for doing what they did in 1860 on the Conservative side (on balance, probably wasn't), and that the Confederates [and the economic benefits of slavery they so desired] were the actual good guys on the Progressive side (on balance, probably wasn't).
The side that's forced to give will probably win... but they also won't be that side any more. They'll be something else.
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The actual question is akin to the one in that HBO Show with the Dumb and Dumber guy. If you cant answer it while referencing people who have been here longer than your ancestors, they better have been here a long time ago and you better agree with them.
I've never seen the Newsroom, so I'm going to need you to clarify what you're trying to get across here.
If you want to claim to love America, it should be for reasons George Washington and Andrew Jackson would agree with you. That's the tldr
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For years and years, saying positive things about the US in certain fora was almost guaranteed to get a reply with this link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wTjMqda19wk?si=IUMfHBNYz1GPtRdn
For better or worse, this is what a lot of people think of when asked to imagine how liberals feel about the country.
ETA: This and Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States
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