Secular Nationalism was never about patriotism
Secular Nationalism was never about patriotism. It was never about loving the Turkish Republic and wanting the best for its people. It was never about having a prosperous community in these lands. It's all about protecting and growing the Empire and the status quo.
Whenever they see AKP doing something, they always say "If this country went back 30 years, it'd be 50 years ahead," or that they miss Atatürk's Turkey, or something like that. Always focused on the past. Never offering solutions for the present and future. Whenever they see something happening that would actually be beneficial for the country, but perceived as going against the norms and structures of the early, golden days of the Republic, they immediately push away, say it's "terrorism" or "treason" and that the people pushing for change should be hanged like the "good ol' days".
Their heads are so stuck in the past. Those days that they consider when Turkey was a strong, prosperous nation. Almost as if they're protecting... something. The status quo, that is. Good or harmful, the "foundations" of the Republic should be protected, no matter how rotten or unstable it might be. They don't want a Republic. They want an Empire. And they want it so that only those deemed pure Turkish (is there even such thing as a pure Turk?) shall benefit from its riches, even though the land belongs to other people as much as it belongs to us Turks (They don't like the idea of sharing, either).
Their "secularism" is fake too. It does pretty much nothing to counter AKP barbarism, because their secularism merely comes from wanting to go back to the status quo of 1920s' Turkey. They never thought over what secularism truly means, so they usually either completely skip over actual attacks on secularism, or see something completely harmless as a threat to secularism.
The deconstruction of the modern status quo doesn't come with merely bringing back a past status quo. It comes with, with references and lessons learned from the past, pushing against all its rotten parts and rebuilding something better.
