Let's make one thing tragically clear right now. Conservatives in general are not patriots, and the more hardcore conservative they are, the less patriotic they are. The very idea of a "conservative patriot" right now would be a complete joke if it weren't so fucking tragic. They are far from being patriots. No, conservatives are too reckless and dangerous to be patriots. They consistently veer closer and closer to being traitors to this country, and in the last twenty or thirty years they've enthusiastically crossed that line several times.
During the American Revolution, the Conservatives were actually against fighting alongside Britain. They sided with the British against their own colonies. They were the "Party of No" way back then, too. Keep in mind that a conservative is someone who wishes to "promote, preserve and or restore traditional values, hierarchies, and institutions." Well, in 1776, that meant they wanted absolutely no part in separating from England and the monarchy. They liked being subjects of King George III. They were called "Tories" then, and that name is still used in England by the Conservative Party.
Conservatives in this country started on the wrong side of history, and that's where they've been ever since.
After the American Revolution, many conservatives fled back to England, or ended up moving to Canada or one of the Caribbean islands. Good riddance. Unfortunately, many conservatives fled to Florida, which at the time of the Revolution was the one British colony (the British having acquired it from the Spanish) that sided with England during that time. When Florida was acquired by the United States, the US got all those traitors back.
After the Revolution was over, the conservatives in the new United States began predicting the country's demise. Almost universally, they believed that the "common rabble" could not govern themselves without the entire thing falling to chaos and anarchy. To a man they refused to call themselves "American", and many vocally expressed anticipation on the British returning to America and "liberating" the colonies from the "barbaric commoners" who had taken it over. As such, when the War of 1812 broke out, they once again returned to form and supported the British against the nation of which they were supposedly citizens.
That same war was the one that finally dashed the hopes of American conservatives that Britain would come and "liberate" the American colonies. The conservatives, as I noted, might have welcomed the British with open arms, but their love of the British died when the British began looting, burning, and pillaging everywhere they went. The British also incited the various Indian tribes to attack frontier settlements, once again stopped trade, and so on.
This didn't sit well with the American conservatives. Their supposed saviors turned out to be just another pack of rampaging barbarians, and for the first time the conservatives began identifying themselves as "American."
Better late than never, I suppose.
Make no mistake, though. The nascent loyalty of the American conservatives to their own country was weak, tenuous, and easily broken. This was readily apparent in 1861, when conservatives decided that they'd rather betray their country than put up with Abraham Lincoln as president. They stomped off in a huff so they could form a nation where "states rights" triumphed Federal law, and where all right-thinking, decent Americans were free to own as many other human beings as they could afford. This act of arrogant conservative ideology run amok killed over seven hundred thousand Americans, and brought about the first assassination of a political leader on American soil.
You'd think that such a shameful chapter in their history would have at least shamed conservatives into thinking before they started talking, but no. One hundred and fifty years later, the descendants of these traitors are proud of their ancestor's treason. Conservatives proudly fly the Confederate flag. Sometimes they actually place that treasonous banner in a place of honor over the national flag of the United States.
Not only that, but many of them seem to be planning another try at secession. Several Texas conservatives (including Rick Perry, the current governor of that state as I write this) have remarked openly about seceding. Up in Alaska, former governor-turned-vice-presidential-candidate Sarah Palin belongs to a group called the Alaskan Independence Party, which advocates secession. Local and state-level conservative politicians from Wyoming, including former Vice-President Dick Cheney, have remarked that the people of Wyoming are actively considering secession.
Ironically, all this fuss and feathers involving secession is once again been caused because these people would rather betray their country than put up with Barack Obama in the White House. Its the same childish posturing, the same macho angst. The same bluster. And it just goes to show how shallow any real patriotic feeling flows among these so-called "conservative patriots."
Conservatives have always wanted to thwart the democratic process, since the beginning. When the Constitution was being written, it was the conservatives who wanted to restrict citizenship to white men who owned property above a certain number of acres. They also wanted Senators hand-picked by state office-holders. The reason for these two measures was simple: they were "conserving" the aristocracy.
By the way, these same measures are precisely how the old aristocracy has the British House of Lords rigged up.
It is a statement of historical fact that the conservatives in this country have stood in opposition to every effort to expand the vote away from white male property owners. They have also stood opposed to all efforts to have most government positions, including senators, congressmen, and even the presidency itself open to popular vote.
They have stopped at nothing, and will continue to stop at nothing, in order to interfere with the popular vote.
Over the years they have thrown up poll taxes, literacy testing, blatant intimidation, inconvenient and unnecessarily strict ID requirements, setting up onerous and punitive restrictions on voter registration, outlawing voter registration programs, providing insufficient numbers of voting machines, blatantly rigging elections, tampering with vote counting, and even getting the United States Supreme Court to violate a sovereign state's Constitution in order to hand-pick a President, just to name a few of the malodorous and unethical tactics that have been used by conservatives to lower voter turnout among the "common folk".
And do not think that these tactics are things of the past. Many of them are being put in place as I write this.
Quite recently as I write this, conservatives such as Justice Antonin Scalia, Governor Rick Perry of Texas, former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, and many others have actively pursued the repeal of the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution, which grants the right to vote for their senators to the people of the United States. Instead, they want Senators to be hand-picked by the state legislatures. In other words, they want to take power away from the common folk and hand it back to the aristocracy.
Even worse, since the last time conservatives were allowed to nearly bring this country to its knees back in the 1920s, conservatives have deliberately been disseminating propaganda which paints any government that isn't run by themselves as evil, corrupt, and bad for the nation. When they aren't in control, conservatives do everything they can to disrupt and delegitimize the political authorities of the duly elected liberals who are in charge. This is a hair's breadth away from High Treason. K'ung Fu-tzu, the Chinese philosopher and politician known better today in the United States as "Confucius", once said that it would be better for nation to lose its security and all of its food than for the nation's government to lose the trust of the people. Many otherwise powerful nations over history have fallen apart because such trust was lost. Once the people lose their trust in their government, civil strife and anarchy are sure to follow.
And do not for one moment think that the conservatives don't know this. They can read history just as well as I can, and they know what it means. Why do you think they're trying to undermine trust in the government? It's a power play. They believe that once the common people mistrust their government, they'll be able to sweep in, making promises left right and center, and the people will love them so much that they (the common folk) will never know that the conservatives want to bring us back to the days of feudalism.
This nefarious scheme has won conservatives elections, but it has been one of the most disastrous strategies for the country itself of any political tactic in the history of the United States. This scheme intentionally fosters deep and passionate division among the people, and a divided people are much easier to rule. Conservatives are gleefully fanning the flames of not just disagreement but outright hatred for all things that aren't conservative, no matter how moderate these non-conservative things might be. Over the past fifty years, conservatives have spit venomous bile at the likes of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and most particularly Barack Obama, along with any ideas and proposals they make.
And they do this even when the ideas and proposals were originally put forth by conservatives, like "ObamaCare", which began life as "RomneyCare," a creation of former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.
This is the point at which some of my Libertarian friends will say, "There is no difference between parties. They both do these things." No. This is a blatant lie. The vitriol spewed by conservatives for their liberal counterparts are entire orders of magnitude more venomous and hate-filled, and more damaging to national unity and stability than anything coming from the liberal side.
Conservatives value party ideology and dogma over American ideals and values, including the all-important idea that we are one nation, united. Guided by their disloyalty, conservatives seek to divide and separate themselves, whom they consider "superior", from all others, whom they regard as "inferior." This naturally pits them in direct opposition to most Americans. but then, they do not like most Americans. They demonize and blame the country's problems on the blacks, on the Hispanics, on the poor, on the homosexuals, on the immigrants, on unions, on teachers, on firefighters, on government workers, on lawyers, and naturally, on liberals. They blame anyone and everyone who is not one of them. Not a fact in the world can possibly justify this arrogant assumption of superiority, nor support the blatantly prejudicial thinking that supports it, but conservatives truly believe that if you spread a lie wide enough and often enough times, if they spew their prejudicial hate-mongering message loudly enough, just enough gullible voters will believe it, and once enough people believe it, no one will ever remember that it all started out as a big fat lie.
The sad thing is, they're right about this.
So, as they are by nature in opposition to the interests of the American people, a Conservative's only real means of controlling the people is by way of dividing and conquering. Conservatives know they cannot win by standing on their positions and their true agenda. Rather, they must lie, deceive, frighten, divide, and subjugate. The whole idea of a United States of America is contrary to conservative objectives. What they want is an America divided into a caste system; a distinctive separation into a hierarchy between the politically and economically powerful haves and the utterly disenfranchised and subjugated have-nots. They want a system of oppressors (themselves) and oppressed (everyone else). And boy howdy, do they have a real problem with the idea of "We the People..."
To quote William F. Buckley, conservatives stand athwart democracy, yelling, "Stop!"
Conservative politicians wrap themselves in the flag and wallow in false patriotism. What they are actually doing is everything they can to stop the democratic process while denigrating and foment distrust for the American government. From Warren G. Harding's corrupt cronyism to McCarthy's witch hunts to Nixon's paranoia to Reagan's blatant disregard for the law to Bush's willful incompetence to the unprecedented obstructionism of today's Republican party, conservatives in America are actively working to murder their own nation.
Because they hate their own nation.
