I agree totally with what you said. I truly am baffled over their hatred for America. I also know that if you asked them why they hated America, they would say that they LOVE America--even as they were calling an imperialistic, capitalistic, racist, sexist . . . facist state run by madmen who care only about oil and their manhood.
All my working life I have been surrounded by the worst of the liberals and I have no idea what makes them tick!
May they all end up off the Horn of Africa with pirates bearing down on them and the US Navy too weakened to rescue them.
McVey
It comes down to utopianism. These people have come to believe, on the basis of some political theory like Marxism or something of the like, that a system embodying "social justice" (or some other utopian ideal; it might be racial purity for the corresponding right-extremists) is possible. However all the societies that come closest to embodying "social justice" fall woefully short of the utopian's (impossible) ideals.
The reason they fall short is due in the end to core attributes of the liberal society like liberty and individual rights, limited government, the rule of law, free markets, etc. In the liberal society free people choose to shape their lives according to their own aspirations, ignoring utopian schemes.
The liberal society is an affront to the utopian leftist, precisely because it is by far the best, most successful and most humane type of society in all of human history. It stands thus as a galling and insufferable refutation of all the left's cherished political theories.
You can't get to the utopia starting with the liberal society, but you CAN get there (if you ever could, even though you can't) starting with despotism and deprivation. This is why the left loves the sordid tyrannies of the third world.
The utopia can only be achieved by revolution. The prevailing order must be swept away and the utopia constructed, according to strict ideological design criteria, on it's ashes. Thus utopianism leads inevitably to nihilism (destruction of the existing order) and to totalitarianism (since the utopia is always based on totalism, the complete and uncompromising acceptance of a single organizing scheme). And of course nihilism and totalitarianism is as far as the utopian project ever gets.
Thus utopian leftists desire the destruction of society, and ESPECIALLY the liberal society since it is the most resistant to, and the strongest bulwark against, revolution.
The preceding explains the hard-left: an unappeasable minority probably in the single digits in America, and not much more even in Europe. However the untoward degree of support hard-left projects often receive from those who would be, by default, center-left "liberals" is more mysterious (and more frightening, and more dangerous).
That, like you, I can't explain. Not completely or to my own satisfaction. Although I think part of it, but only part, goes to the aftermath of "McCarthyism".
One result of the reaction to McCarthyism (designedly so on the part of the hard-left) was the erection of a broad social taboo against "Red Baiting". That is it became unseemly and illegitimate to simply identify communists, and by extension other leftist-extremists, as such, even if you didn't take or advocate any hostile or oppressive actions against them.
Of course there was no corresponding taboo against identifying and marginalizing right-extremists. In fact quite the opposite. Incidentally this double-standard has, I believe, end up backfiring on the left. I suspect it's part of the reason conservatism has become a majority ideology, at least in America. Independents and moderates, who often decide close electoral contests, intensely distrust and fear political extremism, whether of the left or of the right. Therefore, other things being approximate equal, they are more apt to trust with their votes the political wing, and the corresponding political party, which seems to have its extremes most effectively controlled and marginalized.
Anyway, back to the argument, the result of the "red baiting" taboo is that leftists are protected against exposure of their true radicalism, and that we all are expected to pretend that their (usually deeply cynical and disingenuous) ideals and good intentions are genuine.
Since "liberals" (as opposed to hard-leftist) are the most intensely horrified and intimidated by the prospect of committing the sins of "McCarthyism," they are also the most fastidious in maintaining this pretense. So fastidious, in fact, that they are apt to actually ignore and forget the hard-left's actual agenda and genuinely believe their moral posturing and Machiavellian lies.