That’s probably a part of it, along with the fact that they’ve identified social progress as being the fault of our decline when it’s far more complicated. Sexual liberation, the genesis of LGBTQ activism in the mainstream and the end of legal segregation coincides with the beginning of the decline of American dominance. They point to those things and say, “That caused it!” When in reality the capitalists weren’t okay with everyone having a slice of the pie, Europe and Japan were largely rebuilt and reindustrialized by the 70s and by the 1990s you have global capitalism in full swing rendering American labor a costly liability to high profit margins. Along with that you have the embarrassing realization that America lost a war in living memory and it’s because counterinsurgency pretty much just turns into genocide and concentration camps for it to be “successful” and even then it turns into a prolonged, bloody struggle that gets too costly in terms of resources and bodies turning the people back home against the war. But conservatives don’t have a materialist analysis of history or present conditions so they just latch onto things that make them uncomfortable or feel they’re “supposed” to hate. I have a pet theory that more people than we realize require special education, but mainstream education is one size fits all so they become anti-intellectual as a coping mechanism for their purported failures in education. Which, solution to that is simple: free community college with attentive professors and tutors and small class sizes in K-12 of no more than 20 children with one teacher and multiple floating support staff AND allowing certain students to work one on one strictly with a tutor. But hey, I’m just some asshole who doesn’t care about high taxes on the wealthy and laughing off fears of a “national debt” (like that means anything lol).