"I think America is currently in a Cold Civil War. The parties, of course, have switched sides since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The party of the Union and Lincoln is now the Democratic party. The party of the Confederacy is now the GOP. And racial polarization is at record levels, with whites entirely responsible for reversing Obama's 2008 inroads into the old Confederacy in three Southern states. You only have to look at the electoral map in 1992 and 1996, when Clinton won, to see how the consolidation of a Confederacy-based GOP and a Union-based Democratic party has intensified - and now even more under a black president from, ahem, Illinois." Andrew Sullivan
The Republicans are self-exiling and becoming a strictly rural, regional party -- frightened away from urban centers and diverse suburbs. But worse, they're fearful of the "browning" of America, both in terms of a threat to white society but also in terms of what this will mean for politics, since Latinos and blacks are leaning heavily in the Democratic column. The conservative movement's refusal to soften or compromise -- driven by the Tea Party -- is slowly suffocating the Republican Party.