But it is not just intolerance that is the hallmark of today's conservatives. They have become little more than the sum of their fears and their hatreds. What they fear most is the modern world and its pace of change. For them, the natural order of things is a country run by white, Protestant males.
Today they are confronted with a black man in the White House, a woman as House majority leader, no Protestants on the Supreme Court, gays asserting their rights, and a Muslim immigrant winning the Miss USA crown. It is all too much to bear.
Instead of dealing with the world as it is, conservatives prefer to feel victimized and be victimized by politicians and pundits who promise a return to an Ozzie and Harriet era that never existed. Reconstructing a nonexistent past includes rewriting history and asserting that only they can channel the real intentions of the founding fathers.
That allows them to deny anything is different from when the constitution was written by that collection of wealthy, white, male, Christians. Back in those good old days, blacks were property, women were in the kitchen, and Native Americans and Latinos were people from whom God said land should be stolen until the Pacific was reached.
To support their history, conservatives have their own facts. They whine constantly about being over-taxed ignoring the fact that the total tax burden is now lower than it has been since before Eisenhower took office. They also have their own science to support the facts they invent. Their answer to evolution is a biblically-based fairy tale. In their version of economics, tax cuts always pay for themselves by creating so much growth that the new tax revenue generated exceeds that lost by the cuts. No matter that no study has ever shown that to be true and that George H.W. Bush once referred to that theory as voodoo economics.