In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Digby reviews Garrett Epps's piece in the Atlantic on the Tea Party's more rabid Constitutional views, and boils the legal nonsense down to a paragraph.  She asks:

When I looked over all of these and thought about how they all seem to revolve around the idea that the States are primary and the nation as a whole is just a loose framework meaning almost nothing, I realized that these people are the real America haters. They literally loathe the fundamental concept of the United States of America as a nation, preferring to think of themselves as Mississipians or Minnesotans than Americans. Do you think they know that?

They do indeed.  Because to these meatballs, "America" is a land where it's perfectly reasonable to deny basic civil rights to the people you don't like, and that the individual states should have the power to do what they want, all while taking billions of dollars in federal tax revenue handouts and complaining about the far smaller amount of money that they put in.  They figure if they can drive "them" out to the other 49 states, they can then afford to go Galt and get off the federal gravy train for good, and do whatever they want to.

That's the point, to make states into giant gated communities where "we" can live in peace and "they" can literally go to hell with the rest of the country as it becomes more Asian and Latino and Black and gay and secular and science-based and equal and classically liberal.  But Digby's right:  the right has seen the future of America and they want no part of it.

They want out of the American experiment and want to get while they think the getting is good.