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What makes a person derive all his political positions from his belief that America is evil, stupid, corrupt, etc.? For some young people it can be put down to being "fashionable". But it makes no sense whatsoever when we're talking about well-to-do senators and the like. But it's not just posturing. Their knee-jerk response to most subjects is to blame America, find fault with soldiers/policemen, etc.

What explains this?! I just don't believe a normal, rational person can hold these beliefs while living in this society and being almost "lionized" for "holding America accountable".

I think it's a kind of desperation for adequacy and it is, ironically, found at both extremes of American society. In the poor it is, seemingly, explicable: "I don't have, and everyone else does, so what does that make me?" In the rich it seems to be a combination of condescending pity for "the poor" (who BTW are as well off as the middle class was fifty years ago) and a desire to manifest distinctness from the middle class.
The middle class has no desire to tear down the rich and can't afford to patronize "the poor," since its separation from that status is a work in progress.
In any event, the phenomenon of American antiAmericanism puts me in mind of the story of the Almanac editor who received a draft prediction of the year's weather and called up its author:
"Look here," the editor said. "You are predicting that it will snow on the tenth of July. In all of recorded history it has never snowed on the tenth of July."
"No," the author replied, "and it probably won't this year either - but if it does, I'll be the durndest prophet that ever lived!"
These people are so desperate to be superior to middle America that they make fantastic claims - and if any of them ever pans out they will, at least in their own minds, be amazing prophets.
Impromptus: On Dean and Company
National Review Online ^ | 7 Dec 2005 | Jay Nordlinger

I notice your homepage features the Eisenhower "military-industiral complex" quote.
IMHO history, if not historians, has not borne out that warning. Certainly there is danger there, of course - but historically the greater danger has been an antidemocratic, antirepublican Establishment which presumes to say, not merely that the pen is mightier than the sword, but that the sword is irrelevant. Which is countered by John W. Gardner:
"The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will neither have good plumbing or good philosophy. Neither its pipes or its theories will hold water.”
That Establishment is variously pleased to call itself "objective journalism" and "the Democratic Party." Inasmuch as its foundational premise is that "the masses" have no will apart from the sway of propaganda, it is the furthest thing from democratic. And in promoting the fatuous conceit of its own objectivity while promoting its own material and moral interests, it is the furthest thing from objective.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1540286/posts?page=76