Michelle Obama received a lot of criticism a few years ago when she said “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” She said it was not just because Barack Obama was winning, but because ‘people are hungry for change.’ It was a stunning admission – an acknowledgment that she could not ‘really’ be proud of her country while a majority of her fellow Americans disagreed with her. The response to the World Trade Center attack, our actions in Kosovo to protect religious minorities, our liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban, our attempts at mediation between Israel and her enemies – even something apolitical like the space program – none were a cause for ‘real’ pride, because Mrs. Obama disagreed.

Given that sharp insight into her thinking – and into the way of thinking of many liberals – it should be no surprise that the shrinking circle of Obama supporters is no longer proud of America. Americans still want change, and they are still largely united. But now they want change from the Obama agenda, and they are united around their opposition to big government. And as Charles Krauthammer points out, that’s reason for liberals to regard Americans with shame and criticism, instead of the praise they lavished on them scant months ago.

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking…

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims — a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, “just downright mean”?

Go and read the whole piece. Krauthammer points out that on the key hot-button issues of size of government, gay marriage, the mosque, and immigration, liberals argue that a significant majority of the American people are bigoted. Yet these are the same American people that Michelle Obama was so proud of just two years ago – the same ones who embraced Barack Obama and gave him a resounding majority. Have they really transformed so suddenly into bigots? Isn’t it more likely that they have gotten a taste of what liberals believe, and decided that it’s wrong for America?

Hopefully liberals can be proud of America – rather than contemptuous of it – even when they disagree.

Cross-posted from Liberty Central