Yes, Peter, it's not racial, but then why don't you tell the folks why Pubs indeed have opposed FHer policy pretty uniformly?

Peter Beinart has a rather interesting piece at The Atlantic in which he displays the kind of willingness to look at things in an unclouded way that you see sometimes from left-leaning pundits who aren't totally ate up with militancy.  He says that one can't ascribe racial motivations per se to Pub opposition to the MEC's vision.

He even points out that, per Bennie Thompson's example,  you can look pretty ridiculous trying to claim that you can:

This week, African-American Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson conflated the two. “I never saw George Bush treated like this. I never saw Bill Clinton treated like this with such disrespect,” Thompson told a radio show. “That Mitch McConnell would have the audacity to tell the president of the United States … that ‘I don’t care what you come up with we’re going to be against it.’ Now if that’s not a racist statement I don’t know what is.”

For good measure, Thompson added that Clarence Thomas “doesn’t like black people, he doesn’t like being black.”

Then there’s Thompson’s claim that Obama’s been treated with unique disrespect by a Republican Party that only began rigidly opposing Democratic presidents when an African-American entered the White House. He has a short memory. Conservatives may never have questioned Bill Clinton’s Christianity or his claim to being born in the United States. But they challenged his legitimacy just as aggressively as they’ve challenged Obama’s.

Yikes. First of all, Bennie Thompson has no idea how Clarence Thomas feels about being black, and should thus keep quiet on the subject. Commenting on the racial impact of Thomas’ jurisprudence is legitimate. Attributing that jurisprudence to self-hatred is not. There’s something totalitarian about claiming to know to know how another person feels about himself. And attacking someone’s private motivations is usually a way to avoid confronting his public arguments. Thompson wouldn’t appreciate it if hawks angry at his criticism of U.S. foreign policy called him a “self-hating American.” I doubt he has much sympathy for the right-wingers who call Jewish critics of Israeli policy “self-hating” Jews. (Welcome to my inbox.) Unfortunately, he’s doing exactly the same thing.

Thank you, Peter.  But then he goes on to recite the history of Pub opposition over the last two decades to initiatives put forth by Billy Jeff the Zipper, which he portrays as ferocious and unrelenting.  Which it was.  Which is delightful, by my reckoning.

But he never asks the looming question:  Why, if not for reasons related to bigotry, the ferocity?

And I guess we shouldn't expect him to.  Because the answer is obvious:  the policies were wrong.  By the Billy Jeff era, any non-Progressive strain left in the Dem party was negligible.  If a Dem policy was put forth to address a given issue vexing America, you could count on it to be statist and collectivist.   To trot out what is nearly a trademark LITD slogan, that's why we call them Freedom-Haters.

But one might be left with the impression by Beinart's piece that the explanation is merely that Pubs harbor a blind desire to destroy the Dem brand.

No, Peter, at the core of the ferocity is principle.   Conservatism is all about individual sovereignty, and an understanding of the sacredness of the Constitution as it is written.

That's what FHers really fear: the fact that we stand for something, and that that something is right.