An essay in Commentary magazine on “America-haters” caught my eye because of its dutiful repetition of the official neocon history of American politics since the mid-20^th century. According to this authorized view articulated by Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute, Americans used to love their country, its democratic government, and its principled foreign policy, but during the late ’60s and then more recently, misguided young people have abandoned this sentiment and become vociferously anti-American.

Most of those who fall into this category identify with the left, which views the United States as a bigoted, imperialistic country that is beyond saving. But anti-Americanism, according to Lehman, has also affected the right, or at least that part of the right that does not belong to the neocon communion. Presumably, those who happily adhere to the opinions of Commentary and its editors are the true-blue patriots. But then there are the others, perhaps typified by Nick Fuentes and the advocates of “heritage Americans,” who represent the right-wing “basket of deplorables.” Thus, we encounter in Lehman’s polemic this noteworthy series of observations:

The self-pity and anti-Semitic conspiracy-theorizing that characterize 27-year-oldFuentes’s view of America, for example, are hard to distinguish from the self-pity and anti-Semitic conspiracy-theorizing that characterize much of the American left. Or consider the preference in certain corners for other nations’ mode of government entirely, especially the extremely peculiar affection for the tiny nation of Hungary under the heavy hand of Viktor Orbán, who led his homogeneous land of 11 million. (We’ll see how much that transferred patriotic fervor for Hungary lasts now that Orbán’s party has been ousted.)

Many of the most America-negative new righters characterize themselves as the country’s most ardent nationalists. Yet much as progressives claim to criticize the nation because they love it, some on the right use their claimed affection for America as a shield from behind which they issue nothing but criticisms—about our nation’s environment, or the status of workers, or the decay of our culture—that would not sound out of place in a Democratic politician’s speech in the 1960s. Similarly, much as some progressives seem able to love America only as it could be, some on the darker corners of the online right seem able to love America only as they imagine it once to have been—an idyll once sparsely populated by “heritage Americans,” now despoiled by the hordes of brown men ruled over by their Jewish masters.

What joins this right-wing movement with the newly anti-American left is a basically revolutionary tendency. Affection for rulers outside our borders, a fixation on the “Zionist-occupied government,” a belief in the need for some kind of dramatic restructuring of American society: All are examples of the conviction that the governing regime here is fundamentally illegitimate and should be replaced. I choose the word “regime” advisedly. A regime is not just who is in power but the fundamental system or mode of government; in a republic, it is the order under which the people rule themselves.

Perhaps it’s never dawned on Lehman that the unauthorized right’s “peculiar affection” for Viktor Orbán is based on his courage in saying “no” to Europe’s LGBTQ+ lobby and its attempt to take over Hungarian schools. Almost alone among European leaders, Orbán stood up for the social morality that Commentary, too, supported throughout the 1980s, before it wandered off into woke-land. Orbán also defended the continued relevance of the European nation-state and its cultural and religious traditions. We who admire Orbán’s resistance to a leftist Zeitgeist will go on liking his “homogeneous land of 11 million,” (note that my father and his family come from Budapest), while deploring the heavy hand of the EU in causing Orbán’s recent electoral defeat.

I am totally at a loss as to why one can’t be a patriot but loathe many of the developments that have overtaken our country since the 1960s. According to Lehman, those of us “on the dark corners of the online right” are able to “to love America only” as we “imagine it once to have been, an idyll once sparsely populated by ‘heritage Americans.’” What about those of us on the right who believe this country was politically and culturally derailed sometime in the 1960s and who don’t want to surrender what remains of it to illegal intruders, including the violent criminals among them, the LGBTQ+ lobby, and its allies in the media, educational establishment, and government? One doesn’t have to condemn Israel as “Zionist-occupied territory” to recognize that what is happening internally in our country should concern us more than Middle Eastern tensions. This is not to deny that our country does have interests beyond our borders. But taking back this country from the cultural and political left is more important to our side than almost any foreign commitment that comes to mind.

Because of Commentary’s pervasive Zionist focus, it may seem necessary to play down the cultural and social issues that profoundly concerned that magazine in the 1980s. We may also assume that the younger generation of neoconservatives who run the publication and who commissioned Lehman’s tirade are less traditional in their social and moral views than those they replaced. But there is no justification for treating as anti-Semitic or allied to the pro-Hamas left those who don’t share Commentary’s Israel-fixation and who have different priorities from those of neoconservative publicists. Not everyone positioned to the right of Lehman holds the same views on the Middle East as those of Candace Owen.

I’m also struck by Lehman’s contempt for those who honor “heritage Americans.” What’s wrong with the Anglo-Protestant culture and morality that these early settlers brought to this country? Not every group that came into the U.S. afterward has shown the same strengths as the ethnicity whose admirers Lehman disparages. I’ll take the German farmers in my part of the country and give Lehman the Somalis in Minnesota, or perhaps those who crossed our Southern border into California yesterday. Perhaps he can talk those newly arrived “Americans” into becoming neoconservatives.