Last week, House Majority Leader John Boehner was aghast that Democrats seek to have the richest Americans share in some of that "sacrifice" everyone else is supposed to make.

Republicans are suddenly worried about dividing Americans? This prompted me to write this column for The Hill:

These are the same Republicans who built their entire electoral strategy over the last several decades around exploiting racial resentment in the South. This “Southern Strategy” eventually led to the mass defection of the Dixiecrats to the GOP. Today, the number of white Southern Democrats is in single digits, with numbers guaranteed to shrink even further next year.

These are the same Republicans who pit union members against other Americans, stoking resentment at the better wages and benefits enjoyed by those who organize. Rather than work to make organizing easier, to lift the standard of living of all Americans, they divide workers at the behest of their corporatist friends.

These are the same Republicans who have declared entire regions of the country unacceptable — from San Francisco, Berkeley, Hollywood, Chicago, Austin and other urban centers to the entire state of Massachusetts. They even fantasize — as Texas Gov. Rick Perry has — of seceding from the United States when they deem our nation insufficiently conservative.

These are the same Republicans who have embraced bigotry against gay Americans, declaring them inferior not just in their minds, but in the laws of the land. They deny equal treatment under the law, while using cynical and divisive anti-gay ballot measures to drive their bigoted vote on Election Day.

These are the same Republicans who stoke fears against brown immigrants, irrespective of legal status. They pass laws that allow law enforcement to single out Americans simply because of the color of their skin or the gods they worship, and are even attempting to circumvent the U.S. Constitution’s freedom of religion and birthright citizenship. The Constitution is sacred — unless it gets in the way of pitting Americans against one another.

These are the same Republicans who cheered the death of an uninsured man at the Republican Tea Party debate last week, because nothing brings Americans together like saying, “Given the choice, I’d rather my neighbors die than have my taxes go up to provide true universal healthcare.”

Where is the GOP’s leadership in all that? It’s tragic that rather than bring America together to fix what ails the country, Republicans merely seek to stoke a class divide that has withered the nation’s middle class.