If there is one thing Republicans want you to know, it’s how much they bleed red, white and blue for America. None of their gatherings is complete without dozens if not hundreds of American flags, attendees sporting flag-themed costumes (some veering close to obscene mockery), Uncle Sam suits or Lady Liberty getups. Jimmy Cagney’s old schmaltz vehicle "Yankee Doodle Dandy" looks restrained by comparison.
Democrats, on the other hand, have borne the stigma ever since the Joe McCarthy era, if not the New Deal, of hankering after alien creeds — a suffocating European “socialism” (meaning anything to the left of Calvin Coolidge) or maybe outright Marxist-Leninism. Conservatives with intellectual pretensions have blamed progressives for following French deconstructionist philosophers. The cabal around Paul Weyrich, an early leader of the Heritage Foundation who left it because it was insufficiently conservative, held that every supposed evil in modern America was a consequence of the left employing the "cultural Marxist" ideas of the Frankfurt School (one of the right’s many antisemitic conspiracy theories) as a blueprint to conquer the culture.
