Conservatives Do Not Love America. They Are Devoted to an Illusion.

Despite the required American flag lapel pin or patriotic scarf and the hyperbolic rhetoric, today’s Tea Party conservatives clearly do not love America, not the America this country’s founders envisioned. What they do love is a fairy tale version of America created from a thoroughly scrubbed and sanitized history, a totally fabricated understanding of the founders’ beliefs and motivations, and a deeply flawed reading of the Constitution and how it is to be interpreted.

No, conservatives don’t love America, they love their made up country that, if they could magically conjure it up, would be a corporatacracy with a thin veneer of theocracy laid over the top to appease the already self-deluded evangelical wing. We live in something like that now, but in their version, there would be no social safety net, no social security and everything that could be privatized, would be. If you think homelessness and poverty are bad now, America a la Cruz would make the Great Depression look like a family picnic.

George Bush once famously said that terrorists attack us because they hate our freedoms. The same can be said for the Tea Party crowd. They hate the idea that women should have freedom over their own bodies, they hate the idea that the government should help elderly Americans to have the freedom to live lives of dignity in their final years, they hate the idea that American workers should have the freedom to demand living wages and benefits from their employers, and they hate the idea that two people in love, who happen to be the same sex, should have the freedom to marry,

I wish I could give conservatives their own country to ruin instead of trying to ruin mine. Not interested in working to fix the problems that truly matter to Americans, like climate change, rampant gun violence, income inequality, a crippled public education system and soaring college debt, they want to waste precious time and energy on the War on Christmas and Hillary Clinton’s emails. Benghazi!!!

Conservatives want to destroy American to try and save it. They want to tear down the country the founders envisioned and replace it with something else that is to them a dream come true, but to the rest of us a living nightmare.

Democratic candidates must hold Republicans accountable in upcoming elections

Why do people vote against their best interests? It’s a question that has been analyzed and debated quite a bit in recent years. In his book What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank does a pretty good job of laying out an argument that when push comes to shove, hot-button social issues such as abortion, school prayer, perceived attacks on Christianity and the general debasing of society by the “other” (minorities, immigrants, Hollywood, etc.) play a stronger role in political identification than we previously thought, and can often trump rational economic issues. I think he makes some important points, but that there are additional factors related to this conundrum.

Our Republican-led Congress let the unemployment benefit extension expire just before Christmas, affecting 1.3 million Americans. This benefit can still be restored, but it’s questionable whether it will be. Mother Jones puts a human face on this critical situation with stories from several people who are experiencing drastic financial hardships as a result of this draconian political decision. It’s a damn shame that in 2014 we have to remind people of this, but the clear point of this article is to show that the Americans who will suffer are not simply welfare cheating minorities as Republicans would have you believe, but hardworking, educated white people who, before they lost their jobs, had been contributing members of society.

How many of these people — not just those highlighted in the article, but those millions of Americans who have very similar stories — will vote for Republicans in the next election? Some, perhaps many, will. This is the great disconnect. This is the dilemma of our times. For a variety of reasons, some good and some very bad, voters cannot make the connection between their financial woes and those who are directly responsible for that situation. Along with the conservative propensity to cloud people’s reasoning by emphasizing emotional social issues, the media plays a large part in this drama with its “A pox on both their houses” reporting that refuses to lay blame where blame is due, afraid that if it does it will lose viewers.

Democratic candidates in 2014 and 2016 need to hammer home the point that the financial misery experienced by millions of Americans is the direct result of the actions, and inaction, of the Republican-led Congress. They held this country hostage by shutting down the government this past year, and now they are destroying lives by withholding needed financial help from people who want nothing more than to pay their bills and feed their families. It’s time to hold the Republican party accountable.