Why are Republicans so down on America?

[pscot]

This was diaried by Hunter over at Dkos. It's a theme Democrats can run on. It's an answer to Rush and Beck and the Teabaggers and that right-wing moonbat at work. Read the whole thing. Arm yourself.

One of the more striking characteristics of the "new" Republican agenda (or the agenda of the conservative movement, or Tea Party movement, or whatever they prefer to call themselves) is how unrelentingly negative it is. Depressingly, ploddingly negative; America is simultaneously the best and greatest country in the world, as blanket assertion, and a nation on a slow death march towards insolvency and irrelevance. America must make sacrifices, goes the refrain, but every one of the sacrifices seems to involve retracting a past long-term success; America must not (something), is the defining chant, where (something) is any number of things that other countries can successfully do and have done, but America cannot, or an even larger list of somethings that America used to do, and quite competently, but America can do no longer.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/17/965571/-No-We-Cant?showAll=yes

[provis99]

1. they don't hate America: they just hate Americans.

[Angry Dragon]

2. +1000 .......... They just hate

Hate is in their blood, hate is in their mind, hate is in their soul
Easy to be negative with all that hate........
They just hate everyone that is not like them
They love their politicians because they think they are gods

[OhioDoink]

3. Most of the info they get is from hate merchants

x( Rush,Glenn and Fox.They have been taught that all our problems are created by everybody else,and the more problems the GOP creates,the more people there are to hate.Anymore that includes most everyone,and everything that is America.

[jemelanson]

4. They hate use because of our freedoms.

they hate us because they can not control us. the hate the fact that we do not all march to the beat of their drum. they hate us because we do not all think like they do, talk like they do, sin like they do. We are dangerous and they hate us.

[undeterred]

5. I don't understand how you run to be an elected official of a government you hate.

And the higher the office is, the less sense it makes. If you freakin' hate the US government, why do you want to be the president?

[bhikkhu]

6. The incompetence of government has been drilled into everyone

...over and over and over. Mostly its offered as common sense now that government can't do anything right, as something that everyone assumes already.

As the OP mentions, the question should be why other governments can do things that we think we can't - like why Finland has such a highly rated government-run education system, why the roads in Europe are so much nicer, why England can provide free education up to the college undergraduate level, why France's health care system is so well liked by the people there...

And then another approach to the question is whether it is even true; a good antidote is to look at all the things that our government has done well. The interstate system, the postal system, the public education and state university systems, the largest and most effective military in the world, an electrical system that provides reliable power to virtually everybody, and so on...some of those things we did better in the past, but the list of things that our government has done that have been models for other developing countries is pretty impressive.