While we're on the topic of hating America

Why do all the MAGA weirdos hate America? There is an answer, and one in which we are reminded that the seeds of the current Trump cult of personality can be found in 19th and 20th century central Europe. I will give you an extended excerpt from the article:

As everyone knows, Donald Trump admires Vladimir Putin, and so a large portion of the Republican Party admires Putin in an imitative and slavish manner. But even before Trump became a candidate, the most regressive elements of conservatism — the paleoconservatives who developed around former Nixon and Reagan staffer (and Hitler apologist) Pat Buchanan, Christian nationalists and reconstructionists inspired by Francis Schaeffer, and the tech-obsessed neoreactionary movement fueled by Silicon Valley money, which has produced JD Vance — discovered how much there was to love about Putin’s Russia.

This New Right also seems to have an easy familiarity with the theorists of totalitarianism. In an interview this June with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Vance invoked the legal architect of Nazi rule, Carl Schmitt — in an effort to blame liberals, the very people Schmitt despised, for wanting to carry out his precept of power over justice. As most people in the reality-based community have noticed by now, operatives of the right habitually project every desire they dare not express onto their opponents. One also wonders where Vance gained his expertise on Schmitt; I doubt the Nazi jurist was a subject in the Yale Law School curriculum.

A moment’s reflection suggests the reason behind the right’s tendency to lavish praise on foreign regimes and their theoreticians: The right does not much care for America, as its leading voices have been telling us over and over for years. Donald Trump, the exalted leader of the gang, habitually refers to his native land as a “third-world country” or a "laughing stock,” and has called fallen U.S. service personnel “suckers” and “losers;” According to one of his social media posts, “WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION!” Vance, his running mate, makes similar disparaging remarks about the country he wants to run.

All of this is logical enough, in that it necessarily flows from their views. The right has told us for some time that it has no use for non-subservient women, minorities, college students (excepting Turning Point USA’s storm troopers), non-Christians, bureaucrats, public school teachers or any other group it wants to target. A Venn diagram of all these groups certainly adds up to more than half the population. The right scorns America as it is, and, contrary to conservatives’ anti-historical nostalgia, as it always has been.

The logical weakness of reactionary movements has actually been their political strength. The seemingly contradictory elements of their platform do not bother their adherents; as we have seen countless times with the GOP, a new party line that flatly negates supposedly timeless Republican principles elicits barely a murmur among the true believers. If the leaders of the party know this fact, they are certainly not going to wise up their foot soldiers.

Perhaps the biggest contradiction of all is that the so-called thought leaders of the GOP — a party that wraps itself in the flag and feels called upon to judge the patriotism of others — are profoundly alienated from the real America as it exists today, the America in which normal people quietly live their lives, work and raise families, and dream their own private dreams. Unable to find solace in such petit-bourgeois domesticity, the socially estranged scholars of Claremont or Hillsdale or some mother’s basement have no problem ransacking the intellectual underworld of Europe during its most blood-soaked eras to find voices that can articulate their grievance, and their rage, more eloquently than they themselves.

As Austrian writer Robert Musil observed, “A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage."

Speaking of anti-American behavior, Florida's wannabe dictator Governor, Ron Desantis is siccing plain clothes police on voters who simply signed a petition to place abortion rights on the ballot in the state. An end-run against his whims is simply unacceptable. And his actions are as Russian as vodka.Note that I would have included borscht, but its origins are Ukrainian, much to the consternation of the likes of Putin and his fanboys.

We know what we have to do, right? Those of us who love our country need to stay united and fight with all our might this November. The alternative to a United States we've grown to love is too bleak to imagine.

PS: Speaking of America haters, Trump's threats to jail his opponents are becoming increasingly Putin-like and unhinged.