Progressives disdain America but love being free to do so. By Gerard Baker.

Is there anything that would actually make them love this country? Do they understand why so many people — not only in America — admire it?

Ben Rhodes, a former Obama White House official, captures … the progressive’s lament on glimpsing a familiar American flag these last few years. “I’d look at the flag that once stirred such emotion in me and feel absolutely nothing,” he writes.

Perhaps in Mr. Rhodes’s case, like Michelle Obama’s, we’ve reached the point where you can be proud of your country only when your boss or someone in your immediate family is running it. That doesn’t sound like America to me. It sounds more like a hereditary tyranny.

But what about all those others who seem to despise everything this country stands for even now that the people they like are in charge, like most of our academics, the staff who run HR departments for big American companies, the prime-time hosts on CNN? I wonder in particular what sort of country they imagine would be better than this.

Last weekend Gwen Berry, an African-American athlete, qualified to represent her country at next month’s Olympics. When the national anthem was played, she turned away and covered her head with a T-shirt.

Imagine if a Chinese athlete did that — maybe raised a fist in defiance and then went to a press conference and demanded that the government stop oppressing Uyghurs or threatening Taiwan. Unless they have hammer-throwing competitions at re-education camps, it would be the last medal ceremony that athlete ever took part in.

That’s true not only of communist China. In most countries in the world, if a talented athlete had been trained, developed and selected from thousands to represent the nation, then went and publicly trashed it all, the public opprobrium would be unrelenting.

In America, you disrespect the institutions of your country, and you get lionized by the media. You take a knee or turn away from the flag or refuse to take the field or the court while the national anthem is played, and you get nodding assent from the authorities who control the sport. You can denounce what your country stands for and get elected to Congress.

That’s fine. It’s all part of the strange, perhaps ultimately unsustainable, contradiction of living in a genuinely free society. But can we at least acknowledge that it is an extraordinary privilege?

This failure to understand American greatness lies at the heart of a delightful paradox in the progressives’ approach to immigration.

Does it occur to them that the main reason the U.S. has a persistent immigration crisis isn’t that nativist Americans want to keep people out? It’s that people keep trying to get in. That’s the thing about an open border. People can go both ways, but they never do, do they? …

Blacks from Africa, Latinos from Central and South America and Asians from Kamchatka to Kerala are yearning to live in the country we are told is defined by white privilege, xenophobia and ruthless oppression of minorities.

Think of that. What kind of enduring appeal must a country have, what kind of values must it convey to the world that it can so easily supersede the strenuous efforts of its own people to defame it?

Demographics is destiny? Maybe the Democrats have misread that too.

Progressives are playing a self-defeating game with immigration. They seem to think that when the migrants get here, they’ll swallow the education system’s prevailing propaganda and hate the country. It doesn’t work like that.

The Democrats are responding to the defections of people of color (POC) to the Republicans by ramping up the anti-white racism that holds their electoral coalition together. But even that will not work. Importing a new electorate will fail even in electoral terms.

The left will bust the USA rather than admit they were 100% wrong to turn away from color blindness and historical cultural roots.

hat-tip Stephen Neil