The most-quoted line from Al Franken’s 2003 bestseller “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” attempts to draw a distinction between conservative and liberal forms of patriotism. 

“Conservatives love America like a four-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups,” wrote Franken, a comedian who would, only five years later, would be elected U.S. senator from Minnesota as a Democrat. “To a four-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.” 

Twenty-three years on, the right still has that infantile view of America. Under the thumb of Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda, it has grown even more petulant. Conservatives won’t tolerate any information that complicates their desire for flag-waving. The United States is a one-of-a-kind nation, and its history one of uninterrupted excellence. There’s no room for nuance and no time for reflection. Any mention of the perverse institution of slavery or of the many bloody, pointless conflicts the nation has led or joined, particularly in the last 50 years, is treated by the right like a “Yo Momma” joke, an intentionally offensive attack on a saintly figure that could not and cannot do wrong.   

The difference between liberals and conservatives on this issue can be seen, oddly enough, in Franken’s disappearance from the national stage. Following accusations of sexual harassment, the former “Saturday Night Live” star and constant presence in left-of-center media was quickly pushed aside. Liberals could still enjoy Stuart Smalley skits and support Franken’s political positions, but many felt guilty about their past support for a man who arguably didn’t deserve it. In a word, they felt shame.  

You’ll find no such contrition on the other side of the aisle. On Monday, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan cemented his lackey status with the president when he told reporters that Americans shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in recent months got what was coming to them. Karl Rove, the man who helped cook up the lies used to justify a war that left more than a million Iraqis dead, still makes regular appearances on Fox News. He’s joined on the network by Oliver North who, as a National Security council staff member during the Reagan administration, illegally provided arms to Contra groups that carried out atrocities against civilians in Nicaragua. Henry Kissinger’s misdeeds in Cambodia couldn’t keep the College of William and Mary from appointing him chancellor. 

To the conservative mind, these men were working in service of American interests. Because America is great, their actions must be great, ipso facto, Q.E.D.

That sort of black-and-white thinking was always going to clash with the shades of gray in Christopher Nolan’s smash-hit adaptation of “The Odyssey.” In his retelling of Homer’s epic poem, Nolan imagines Odysseus as a man haunted by the sacking of Troy. His covert operation to sneak within the city walls was a betrayal of bedrock beliefs about honor and civility, a shameful act that brought humanity into a darker age. The king of Ithaca’s pride in his ingenious trick is steadily sapped by a series of cosmic punishments. He returns home in beggar’s clothes with a plan to pay penance to the scores of souls he unjustly sent to the underworld. 

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In true originalist fashion, conservatives spent the months leading up to the release of “The Odyssey” raging about Nolan’s decision to cast nonwhite actors in starring roles. Like the originalists on the Supreme Court, they’re largely making up their argument out of whole cloth and using the imagined thoughts of long-dead people as a fig leaf for their own prejudices.  

For these pseudo-historians, complicating Odysseus was another liberal assault on Homer’s tale. As a great king from a mythical age, at least in their view, any suggestion that Odysseus might feel a genuinely human reaction is heretical to the right-wing mind, a slight against their preferred bedtime stories. 

In a review for Fox News subsidiary OutKick that might as well have been written in crayon, Jon Root described Odysseus’ lingering guilt as “character assassination.”

“The new stories being told in this film mostly feel like . . . a complete betrayal of the source material that made so many of these characters worth investing in,” he wrote.    

At the end of the film, Matt Damon’s haggard Odysseus sails toward the unknown, accepting that he doesn’t deserve the comfort of a king. He’s uniquely responsible for ushering in an age of barbarism and will spend the rest of his life making amends in the fallen world he helped create. 

Kissinger, in contrast, defended the bombing of Cambodia until he died peacefully at the age of 100. In its obituary,  the William F. Buckley-founded National Review praised the former secretary of state as a man who spent his life tamping down turmoil. 

Sing to them, muse, of an uncomplicated man.

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According to a Pew Research Center survey released in October 2025, large majorities of Americans are unhappy with both political parties. Three-quarters were frustrated with the Democrats, and almost as many felt the same about the GOP. Half said they are downright angry with both parties. Partisanship is responsible for some of it, of course. But despite all the talk from Donald Trump about the “golden age” of America being upon us — symbolized by the gaudy, gilded gew-gaws all over the White House and Washington — just over a third of Republicans said their party makes them feel hopeful, and far fewer noted it makes them feel proud. Democratic voters were even less hopeful and proud than their rivals. This is not a healthy political system. 

The loathing for the parties doesn’t just come from the high-profile national campaigns. Republicans and Democrats alike have been taken over in recent years by a populist uprising coming from within. From the Tea Party on the right to Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders-led democratic socialist movement on the left, there has been a large shift away from the traditional politics of party leaders and ideological conformity to a more grassroots-oriented politics. 

Both sides have at least one thing in common: They loathe the political and media elites who, they believe, have lost touch with ordinary people and run the country for their own interests. This should not surprise anyone who has observed politics for the past 30 years or so. Those elites have shown their tone deafness toward the concerns of the average American for decades, and the rise of cable television and the 24-hour news cycle, conservative talk radio television, the internet and social media have successively given people a front-row view of their pretentious arrogance. 

One person in Washington perfectly illustrates this phenomenon: Sally Quinn, the longtime columnist and doyenne of what remains of the Georgetown set. Married to the legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee until his death in 2014, Quinn has functioned, at least since the 1980s, as the self-appointed spokeswoman of the nation’s permanent political establishment. 

In 1998 she wrote the seminal essay on official Washington’s state of mind during Ken Starr’s investigation into Bill Clinton. The day of that year’s midterm elections, the Post published “Not in their back yard: in Washington, that letdown feeling,” which quoted numerous political and media denizens expressing their shock and horror at Clinton’s inappropriate behavior with Monica Lewinsky. Those interviewed insisted their disgust wasn’t about the unseemly power differential between the president and the former White House intern, and they insisted it wasn’t about the sex. Rather, they were apparently upset that Clinton had lied to them about the affair, as if they thought that it all would have been fine if he had just shared it with them privately at a glittering, intimate dinner party. 

The quotes were unbelievable. “There is a small-town quality to the grief that is being felt,” said journalist Andrea Mitchell, “an overwhelming sadness at the waste of the nation’s time and attention, at the opportunities lost.” Muffie Cabot, Nancy Reagan’s former White House social secretary, mourned, “This is a demoralized little village . . . the emperor has no clothes. Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn’t quite as sordid as this.” 

But the piece de resistance came from the then-dean of the Washington press corps, Post columnist David Broder, who lamented, “He came in here and he trashed the place — and it’s not his place,” as if the nation’s capital belonged to him and Quinn and their kind, rather than the American people. 

Quinn vapidly observed in passing, “For reasons they cannot understand, Washington insiders come across to the public as judgmental puritans, shocked and horrified by the president’s sexual misconduct,” which was completely off the mark because contemporary polling showed that people saw the non-stop, six-year crusade against Clinton by the GOP and media establishment as over-the-top and hypocritical, not that it excused Clinton’s conduct. 

As the election results trickled in later that night, it emerged that Republicans had unexpectedly lost seats. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was forced to resign his seat, and just a few months later, on the very day he was impeached by the House, Clinton’s approval rating reached 73%. The number was not an endorsement of the president’s behavior; it was a reaction against the hypocrisy of the GOP and the elitism of the same establishment elites Quinn portrayed as the nation’s moral conscience.

One might have thought Quinn and her fellow Washingtonians would have taken a beat to question whether they were actually qualified to be the voice of American democracy when they were so clearly out of touch with the people. But that didn’t happen. 

Now, nearly 30 years later, Quinn is at it again, this time railing against Donald Trump in the same tone she deployed against Clinton. 

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No longer writing for the Post after it acquiesced to Trump and MAGA after the president’s return to office, Quinn instead contributed an op-ed to the New York Times called “Watergate-Era Washington Was Less Toxic Than This” that described how vulgar and frightening D.C. has become under the second Trump administration. She claimed that everyone is terrified, even Republicans, and waxed nostalgic for the days when she and the “charming, funny, bright, thoughtful” Lindsey Graham, the late Republican senator from South Carolina, could talk about throwing bipartisan dinner parties together. Sadly, those days are over, and the barbarians have trashed the gates — again. The crude Trumpers are having too much fun with their vulgar galas and economic excess. 

Evoking the Watergate crisis, Quinn seemed to have no recollection of eagerly joining that earlier GOP crusade against Clinton, despite the widespread understanding of its cynical partisan nature — and how that marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s descent into the ruthless partisan warfare that resulted in Trump’s election and non-consecutive reelection. 

On Sunday, Quinn wrote another essay for the Times announcing “It’s No Longer So Much Fun to Be MAGA in Washington.” Apparently, the inhabitants of the village have noticed that the GOP, under strain from the relentless failure of Trump’s policies, isn’t feeling its oats so much these days. She describes a “popular annual cocktail buffet at the Hay Adams Hotel on the rooftop overlooking the White House” on the night of Trump’s UFC cage fight on the White House lawn. The party’s attendees laughed and scoffed at the “garish,” “grotesque” and “bizarre” scene below, much relieved they were suddenly feeling the return of “bipartisan” revulsion at the spectacle of a usurper “trashing the place.”

I confess that I, too, was appalled at the grotesque display that night. And I, too, have nothing but revulsion for everything Trump stands for. But when I read those words coming from the likes of Quinn and her elitist comrades, I actually felt some sympathy for Trump’s MAGA followers. Quinn’s description of this soi disant aristocracy literally looking down on the plebes who refuse to know their place was almost enough to make me don a red cap and burst into a rousing rendition of “YMCA.” 

Nothing provides a boost to Trump’s MAGA agenda like the brand of Washington snobbery Quinn’s writing chronicles, and it’s this kind of thing that’s driving both parties to populism. If Republicans and Democrats could come out of their corners and recognize their common foe, we might actually get a little of that vaunted bipartisanship for which Quinn and her fellow travelers are so nostalgic. 

Unfortunately, it might not work out so well for them if that happens.

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