Tea parties, Confederate history, and right-wing rebellion

By Michael J.W. Stickings

If you haven't yet, make sure to check out Frank Rich's column in yesterday's Times. Key passage:

Most Americans who don't like Obama or the health care bill are not racists. It may be a closer call among Tea Partiers, of whom only 1 percent are black, according to last week's much dissected Times/CBS News poll. That same survey found that 52 percent of Tea Party followers feel "too much" has been made of the problems facing black people -- nearly twice the national average. And that's just those who admit to it. Whatever their number, those who are threatened and enraged by the new Obama order are volatile. Conservative politicians are taking a walk on the wild side by coddling and encouraging them, whatever the short-term political gain.

The temperature is higher now than it was a month ago. It's not happenstance that officials from the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Virginia and Mississippi have argued, as one said this month, that the Confederate Army had been "fighting for the same things that people in the Tea Party are fighting for." Obama opposition increasingly comes wrapped in the racial code that McDonnell revived in endorsing Confederate History Month. The state attorneys general who are invoking states' rights in their lawsuits to nullify the federal health care law are transparently pushing the same old hot buttons.

It's ugly out there.

And, at the center of the ugliness, conservatism has become an ideology of revolt, with the Republican Party right alongside it, against enlightenment, and against the possibility of America as something noble and just.

Didn't Lincoln win a bloody civil war against this sort of domestic extremism?