And make no mistake about it, they do hate America, despite their flag pins, tri-cornered hats and Orwellian declarations of patriotism. What they love is a fiction, the "Real America" of wistful memory and ardent longing, a community of people who believe, behave and yes - look - just like themselves. What they hate is the reality of America, an enormous, complex place filled with the most diverse population in the history of the world, an America in which gay marriage is now legal, in which women are happily exercising the freedom to both celebrate and control their own sexuality, in which one out of eight citizens is an immigrant, and in which millions more undocumented workers (many of them speaking Spanish) perform the menial jobs that Americans no longer want to do. They hate an America in which the small towns and rural areas where they are primarily concentrated are depopulating, in which evangelical Christianity is shrinking in size and influence, and in which globalization has destroyed the economic security they once took for granted. Most of all, they hate the America that has twice elected a black man to be President.
In short they believe that their way of life is under attack, that they have lost control of the culture, the country and the future, and in large part they are correct. They have no plan to address those concerns except denial and resistance, and one could almost feel sympathy for them except for the fact that their representatives in Congress are now engaged in a desperate power struggle that threatens to destroy the actual country in which we live in a misguided effort to preserve the "Real America" of their fantasies.
Many of the these observations are intuitive, but they have also been documented in a focus group study by the Democracy Corps entitled "Inside the GOP".
That report, which can be found here: http://bit.ly/... seeks to understand the motivations of the Republican base in the current standoff in Washington. The study categorized Republicans into various camps, including:
"Evangelicals. Social issues are central for Evangelicals and they feel a deep sense of cultural and political loss. They believe their towns, communities, and schools are suffering from a deep “culture rot” that has invaded from the outside. The central focus here is homosexuality, but also the decline of homogenous small towns. They like the Tea Party because they stand up to the Democrats.
Tea Party. Big government, Obama, the loss of liberty, and decline of responsibility are central to the Tea Party worldview. Obama’s America is an unmitigated evil based on big government, regulations, and dependency. They are not focused on social issues at all. They like the Tea Party because it is getting “back to basics” and believe it has the potential to reshape the GOP."
Note that both the Evangelical and "Tea Party" groups in the study support the actual Tea Party movement. The difference in labeling was simply an effort by the study authors to distinguish between the people who were religiously motivated and those who were not. In both groups the common connection was fear - of the culture, of change, of the future, of the government itself. The most common words they used to describe their feelings about the direction of the country were "worried, "concerned," "discouraged" and, of course, "scared."
Note too that most of these concerns have nothing whatsoever to do with our current fiscal crisis or even with Barack Obama. Evangelicals lost the culture wars years ago, and anyone concerned about "big government" should have been even more upset during the Bush Administration than they are now. George W. Bush was a big government conservative who bullied a reluctant nation into an unnecessary war, promulgated the undemocratic legal theory of the "unitary executive," established the surveillance state, nationalized educational standards, and dramatically expanded Medicare coverage. So why did none of those actions prompt the political frenzy we are witnessing now? Probably because the Evangelicals, at least, believed George Bush was one of them, and that sense of identity comforted them.
That changed dramatically with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, with whom there was no sense of common identity. It was not merely that Obama was African-American, but that he had a foreign father, a Muslim name, an unusual personal history, an Ivy League education, and lived in a big city. He was, in every way, the personification of the "Other" for the Republican base, someone who neatly embodied nearly all of their anxieties. Those anxieties were also dramatically inflated by the near-collapse of the economy in 2008 and the sudden - and unexpected - shift in the national attitude toward gay marriage since then. The fact that President Obama was reelected rather easily in 2012 is literally inexplicable to the Tea Party adherents, who are prone to irrational denials of discomfiting realities of all sorts, and for them it signified the final death knell of the "Real America."
You cannot understand what is happening in Washington without understanding this mindset, or without appreciating the depths of Tea Party despair. It does not matter to many of them that a default on government debt could plunge the entire world into a depression if it humbles the Marxist Muslim "Other" who currently occupies the White House. Nor do they care that no political party has been as unpopular as the GOP is today (literally: http://bit.ly/...). This is their last stand. In their minds they are the warriors of Masada, determined to fight to the death against the heathen empire which is besieging not only them, but their entire way of life.
Unfortunately for them, Masada ended badly. Unfortunately for us, the enemy they hate is the country in which we live. It is America.