It’s telling indeed that while everyone, irrespectively of political partisanship, can’t refer to “racism” enough, few people, if any, want to spend any time at all talking about “anti-Americanism.”

The remotely curious should want to know why the topic of anti-Americanism has seemed to have fallen into disrepute.

I have a theory: Democrats and the left would prefer not to discuss anti-Americanism because they know that they themselves are anti-American, and rabidly so. Republicans and those in the Big Conservative media who serve as their apologists are averse to charging their opponents with anti-Americanism for one or both of two reasons: They want to avoid being counter-charged by the left with something like “McCarthyism” and/or such Republicans know that they themselves couldn’t beat this same allegation if it was hurled back at them.

The truth of the matter is that although there are undoubtedly individual Democrats who love their country and will be both shocked and offended that anyone would dare impugn their patriotism, the ideology of the contemporary Democratic Party, the ideology of the left, is unequivocally, resoundingly, unabashedly anti-American.

To be clear, there is nothing in the least objectionable about criticizing aspects of American life, or policies of the American government. In fact, there is much room for criticism, particularly given the extent to which politicians and media elites in both parties continue to manipulate, deceive, and otherwise coerce the American public into retreating ever further from being the Republic that America’s Founders intended toward being the Empire that the Founders dreaded.

The American Empire is not the country of America considered as a more or less continuous project comprised of generations extending back centuries. The anti-Americanism of the left to which I refer is an animosity toward America considered as a historical country, not a Rationalist or ideologically-inspired Empire.

The anti-Americanism of the left is contempt for Americans, specifically, white Americans, most of whom are Christian, heterosexual, (more or less) pro-capitalist, and who love their country.

Again, the left couldn’t be more anti-American in this sense.

This is no hyperbole. It is the only verdict that an honest observer could draw. As for the Republicans, more will be said of them at a later time.

In every conceivable way—logically, metaphysically, and morally—it is nothing less than impossible for leftists and Democrats to simultaneously love America and equate it, as Kamala Harris has equated it, with a crime scene.

In fact, AmeriKKKa, is worse than a crime scene; it is a war zone, a bastion of “white supremacy,” “racism,” and every other transgression in the catalogue of the left’s greatest evils.

To put it bluntly, and as anyone with an IQ above room temperature must recognize, a person who sees America as having been founded upon racial oppression that was as systematic as it was comprehensive, who sees its foundation as having been laid in racial terrorism and genocide, upon the crushed bones and bloody corpses of countless numbers of innocent men, women, and children of color, cannot, must not, harbor anything but unmitigated contempt for such a bastion of murderous White Villainy.

No, even “AmeriKKKa” must, in the eyes of the left, fail as a moniker to capture the heinousness of the United States. Indeed, such was the brutality of the men and women—the white men and women, especially the men—who founded this country that Hitler and his Nazis can only appear as juvenile delinquents by comparison. After all, the Nazis spent a miniscule fraction of the time targeting human beings for destruction over ethnic and religious differences that Americans spent doing so from the 17th century until the War for American Independence and beyond.

Yet even this comparison does not go far enough, for to hear the left tell it, the brutal persecution to which America’s founders subjected scores of non-whites continues virtually unabated through to the present day: Whether it is talk of “Institutional Racism,” “White Privilege,” “White Supremacy,” or (the latest) “White Nationalism,” the left insists that there is an essentially straight, and shockingly short, line stretching from the slave traders and masters of the 18th and 19th centuries to the average white American of today.

An individual of the left subscribes to a virulently anti-American ideology. A self-consistent leftist who insists upon his or her love for America is either morally perverse, mentally ill, cognitively challenged, or flagrantly dishonest (or some combination of the above).

Which of America’s founders is your favorite founder and why? This is the question that every Democratic presidential candidate (and, for that matter, every other Democratic politician and leftist media celebrity) needs to be asked.

Democratic politicians and talking heads love to cite the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution whenever it suits their purposes. But the first was authored by Thomas Jefferson, a white man—a white Southern man—who owned hundreds of black slaves who he didn’t free even in death. The second was written largely by James Madison, another white man—a white Southern man—who also owned large numbers of black slaves.

Democrats try to convince the rest of the country that they love America. Yet the “Father” of our country, George Washington, a white man—a white Southern man—was master to well over 300 black slaves.

Even America itself is named after Amerigo Vespucci. Granted, Vespucci was not a founder of what everyone today knows as the United States. Yet he was, nevertheless, a white Christian man from the Old World, a member of that class of greedy, oppressive racial supremacists which destroyed the ancient indigenous civilizations of the New World for the sake of advancing the interests of Europeans.

If statues and monuments, reminders of those white Southern men who fought for the Confederacy, need to be razed because, supposedly, they offend current racial sensibilities, then how much more should those reminders—like the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution—of the white Southern men who authored our country’s sacred documents be discarded, for surely they, too, must harm blacks and every non-white who they meant to exclude.

Now, leftists, or at least high-profile leftists, to say nothing of visible left-wing Democrats, know better than to be as bold as to follow the logic of their reasoning to its conclusion by calling for the erasure from the life of the country of America’s Founders and the texts that they fashioned and ratified. This, though, is why it is unforgivable that so-called “conservatives” have remained virtually silent as the left has waged, and continues to wage, its campaign to purge from the public eye all remnants of the Confederacy:

The only difference between Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, on the one hand, and George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, on the other, is that the latter set of Southern white secessionists, as we have already seen, owned many more slaves than the former set of Southern white secessionists ever did.

To repeat: By any objective measure, and by the left’s own standards, the most revered of America’s Founders were far worse than what leftists imagine the most revered of Confederate heroes to have been.

The reason that every patriotic American should be up in arms (figuratively and, in at least those instances of leftist mob action, literally) over the relentless attack that has been launched upon what Southerners view as their heritage is that the attack on Confederate symbols is, ultimately, a battle waged in the left’s war on America itself.

For the time being, in other words, and until such time as circumstances permit, the old Confederacy must serve as proxy for the real, ultimate target that the left has long had in its crosshairs: America.

If Lee deserves to be retroactively demonized for being a “racist” and a traitor, then so much more does his cousin, George Washington, the Father of America, deserve the same for being a “racist” and a traitor to the Mother country of England. If the Confederate flag and its battle flag deserve to be purged from Respectable Society because they flew over the institution of slavery, then that much more does the American flag deserve this fate, for the Stars and Stripes as well flew over the institution of slavery, and for an exponentially longer period of time than did the Stars and Bars.

The left’s attack on Confederate Americans is part of a concerted attack on all Americans, including, especially, the Americans who founded the country.

But, it will be objected, these leftists and Democrats are Americans themselves! Am I accusing them of attacking themselves?!

According to the conventional wisdom—which, because it serves the left’s purposes, leftists have labored indefatigably to further—American citizenship is nothing more or less than a formality: If you are legally a citizen of the country, then you are an American. In other words, being an American has one and only one meaning, a legal meaning.

Of course, this is a lie. There is all of the difference between being in America and being of America. And the leftist, though in America, is certainly not of it. Being of America is a matter of valuing it, of being committed to conserving its best traditions and institutions, of viewing our liberties as an “entailed inheritance,” as Edmund Burke described the English tradition, an inheritance bequeathed to this present generation by earlier generations who sacrificed blood, sweat, and tears for their posterity.

Leftists are in America, but they are not of it.

The abhorrence for America held by the left and, by implication, the Democratic Party that serves as the vehicle for its ideas was epitomized by way of the ominous promise made by Barack Hussein Obama just days prior to his election to the presidency in 2008. While addressing supporters, Obama remarked that together they would “fundamentally transform” the United States.

The term “transformation” tends to have for Americans a positive connotation. Yet it’s crucial to grasp that a transformation is no mere change; it is radical, total change, a change, not in degree, but in kind.

The transformation of a thing is equivalent to its demise.

It is because the third century Christian theologian Tertullian knew well the nature of transformative change that he staunchly resisted those heretics who accounted for the Incarnation of God in terms of a transformation from God’s divinity into a human being. Such an account, Tertullian realized, actually denies the Incarnation. He explains:

“Transformation involves the destruction of what originally existed: what is transformed ceases to be what it was and begins to be something else.”

Obama’s wish to transform America always was a wish to destroy it.

This is the collective wish of the left.

Thus, the vision of the left is, and can only ever be, zealously anti-American.

This piece was originally published at LewRockwell.com