I have a surprising number of conservative friends, many of whom I respect and love, although some of them are becoming more unlovable by the week. I don’t always understand them, and I particularly don’t understand the extent to which they love to blame the liberals for their woes, and for the woes of our country. But I’m going to bang my head against the wall one more time and lay these things out there:

In my adult lifetime I’ve lived through such conservative dramatics and hysteria as the Moral Majority, the Republican Revolution, the Contract With America, and the Tea Party (I might point out that when liberals muster movements they generally result in something meaningful like stopping wars, or, you know, civil rights, social justice, that sort of corny thing). From 1981-1993 either Ronald Reagan or George Bush (the first) occupied the Oval Office. At the end of those three terms the conservative hoards were still so unsatisfied with the state of the union that, in the 1994 elections, angry Republicans took control of both houses of congress for the first time in 40 years. From 1995-2001 the Republicans maintained a majority in the Senate, and again from 2003-2007, and again from 2015 until the present. They have had a majority in the House of Representatives from 1995-2007, and again from 2011 to the present. The current Republican majority in both houses is the largest since 1929. This same dynamic has played out in State government all over the country.

The conservatives have also had almost 45 years of control of the Supreme Court. From Nixon through Obama there have been 16 Supreme Court appointments; 12 of them have been made by Republican Presidents, four by Democrats. The scorecard on circuit courts and courts of appeals is equally lopsided: 244 judicial appointments for Republicans, 173 for Democrats.

You still have your guns. Last I looked you still had all your rights; the pesky thing is that now a bunch of other people have –at least on paper– those same rights.

So, look, at this point it’s pretty clear, if you really have a problem with our country and its government, you need to recognize that you and your fractious party have largely created it. I suspect, in fact, that it’s not government that you hate, but America itself. This election has made crystal clear that what you’re really uncomfortable with is The Other: blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, gays, women, and any sort of diversity at all. The endless waves of white crackpots that you’ve sent to Washington haven’t yet been able to deliver you a version of freedom that jibes with your purely selfish desires and insecure ideologies and bogus notions about purity, and so you’re determined to keep trying until you blow the whole thing up. And you’re willing to avoid anything that resembles truth if it proves inconvenient to those aims. That’s a damn shame, because your strategy of self loathing is debilitating, and has got you –and us– exactly where we are. How about you all just suck it up, pull yourself away from the poisoned tit of the internet, and finally learn how to be Americans?

– Posted by Brad Zellar on his Facebook Page

That was a good read. Very interesting insight which seems so curiously obvious to me now.