The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Sully prints a long letter from a reader about the American populist right.  A sample:

They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-flouride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrly commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-de-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming, they make up much more of America then you would care to think.

….

As to dismissing them as only a quarter or so of America, please remember that it only took a quarter or so of Americans to actively support the Confederacy.

I think the reader makes a mistake to conflate different people from different regions animated by different issues.  But, on the other hand, what we are dealing with is the chickens coming home to roost.  The Republican Party has coopted the nutters for years.  At first, just with empty rhetoric — as under Nixon who governed as a centrist (he’d be considered something of a liberal nowadays if his racial views mellowed along with the rest of the country), then slowly by adopting relatively cheap policy elements (like actively opposing abortion rights under Reagan and Bush I), then by actually electing a nutter in GWB (though one with a respect for the establishment that comes from being a charter member of it).  But that is over.  The future of the GOP is Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck… ignorant, hateful, violent.

I can understand people refusing for vote Democratic… but I have trouble understanding how people can still vote for the Republicans.  A few years ago Christine Todd Whitman wrote a book, It’s My Party, Too. Unfortunately for her… and for us… it isn’t.