Why Would Any Genuine American Ever be a Rightwinger?

Yesterday's B-and-F with Rightwing Reader (see comments) reminds me of something I've been meaning to blog about for some time: What makes the average American take a hard-right turn?

All of us Americans grew up breathing the same constitutional air, with the same Bill of Rights, and the same cultural stories (I use the word in its large sense)about what America stands for, didn't we?

We are the Land of the Free. We're innately suspicious of government. We originated because of governmental abuse. We don't cotton to domestic spying, which we associate with Red Square and the KGB. That stuff's for the UN-free. Americans won't tolerate it. Freedom belongs to all Americans. It's our birthright.

All men are created equal. We know "men" means "people." All Americans are created equal. Well, OK, we might not be perfect, but we'll get there eventually because of our long tradition of believing that God created us all in God's image.

We have three branches of government because we don't want a king, we know that legislators make mistakes, and we need judges to balance laws against the intent of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. We have 230+ years of legal tradition about what all that means. The idea that judges shouldn't play that role is anathema. It's why we created the judiciary as equal to the executive and the legislative.

We have freedom of religion. Quakers, Catholics, Baptists, and all the rest came here partly to get away from somebody else's idea of what religion ought to be. The last thing we want is an official state religion, because we know where that goes. Besides, no real American would tolerate anybody telling him or her what to think or what to believe.

Now, all this, and much more, is bred in the bone of Americans. So what can possibly cause an American, of all people, to turn his or her back on our founding values?

And more mystifying than that, what make any American think that today's generations--unfamiliar as we are with state oppression, inexperienced as we are in the reality of a state religion, innocent as we generally are (so far) of applied star chambers, domestic detention centers, systematic domestic spying, and genuine authoritarian rule--think for a second that we are wiser than the founders? Our founders experienced all these things, and for that reason, wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that have sustained us so well all these years. Our experience, and our education, are paltry compared with theirs. It's hard to imagine that we could do better at governing than they did.

I'm all ears. What offense in the last forty years was so great that it even conceivably justifies a revolution--think a 180-degree revolution--in the meaning of America? I'd really like to know.