That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.
Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness, and debt, as represented by the tea-party movement? Why, racist resentment of a black president.
Disgust and alarm at the U.S. government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.
Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.
Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near ground zero? Islamophobia.
Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," which was last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance. Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?
Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities - often lopsided majorities - oppose President Obama's social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage, and reject a mosque near ground zero.
What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument.
The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the tea party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless, and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president's proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry, white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.
