The incomparable Noemie Emery takes after the liberals' nonsensical view of their conservative opponents in the Weekly Standard:

Liberals fixate on the GOP's Southern strategy of the 1960s as the key to the modern Republican party, and for a time Nixon did court the Dixiecrats. But by 1980 the Reagans and Kemps had remade the party on a new set of issues and had formed new coalitions.

Those active in the '60s and '70s are now in their sixties and seventies. Younger conservatives (which means most of them) grew up with integration, and take it for granted. They are obsessed not with race but with their causes and principles, oppose all who attack them, and embrace warmly and without reservation all who embrace their own causes. They venerate Thomas Sowell. They embrace Clarence Thomas (and his white wife), embrace Jeb Bush (and his Latina wife), support Marco Rubio against Charles Crist in Florida, and elect Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, which is as deep in the South as it gets. But to Obama's acolytes, the Old South is eternal. And so, when it's useful, are all of its old wars.

Liberals might take the political battles of the last year as they are--an ardent struggle over size-of-government and other first principles--but the emotional payoff would be nowhere near as satisfying. Why have a routine tug of war over taxes when you can replay a great moral drama, casting yourselves as the just and the righteous, and your foes as the ignorant and benighted rabble you know in your hearts that they are?