The entire Republican establishment ripped her apart based on racial terms for three months, further widening the divide between the party and the very important Latino vote. And yet she was confirmed anyway by a 68-31 margin. Knowing that she would very likely be confirmed, the smarter approach would’ve been to lay off the racial crap, but they just couldn’t resist the demagoguery and race-baiting for the delight of their redneck base. The fact is, their base would’ve stuck with them no matter what, but in scrambling to appease the far-right, they lost what remained of their Latino support — arguably the fastest growing voting block in America.

The Republican M.O. doesn’t make any sense from a rational perspective, but it’s a mistake to try understanding it that way. By saying “no,” the GOP is systematically becoming the anti-Obama party in hopes this president will overreach and bring his party down. Here’s a revealing take on the president from The Economist:

Perhaps Mr Obama inwardly cringes at the personality cult that surrounds him. But he has hardly discouraged it. As a campaigner, he promised to “change the world”, to “transform this country” and even (in front of a church full of evangelicals) to “create a Kingdom right here on earth”. As president, he keeps adding details to this ambitious wish-list. He vows to create millions of jobs, to cure cancer and to seek a world without nuclear weapons. On July 20th he promised something big (a complete overhaul of the health-care system), something improbable (to make America’s college-graduation rate the highest in the world by 2020) and something no politician could plausibly accomplish (to make maths and science “cool again”). […] All presidential candidates promise more than they can possibly deliver. This sets them up for failure. But because the Obama cult has stoked expectations among its devotees to such unprecedented heights, he is especially likely to disappoint. Mr Healy predicts that he will end up as a failed president, and “possibly the least popular of the modern era”. It is up to Mr Obama to prove him wrong. (Emphasis mine)

“The Obama cult” is sheer projection. It is of a piece with right-wing “false prophet” rhetoric. Liberals and progressives have been labeled “godless,” secular humanist,” and “atheist” for decades precisely because we don’t swoon over charismatic figures. These are characteristics of the wingnut mind; Republicans are the ones who think laissez-faire capitalism and the Constitution came down from heaven inscribed on stone tablets. I cannot even count the number of progressive bloggers who’ve damned Obama for his centrism.

Ask yourself: what percentage of self-identified conservatives believe in End Times? What percentage of liberals? The answers are exactly what you would expect.

Republicans are betting on an invisible horse. God will rescue their party by revealing the satanic perfidy of this administration. Indeed, they’ve demonstrated a remarkable ability to see that perfidy where it does not exist. Opposition to Sotomayor is red meat for a shrinking base, but it’s also perfectly in line with their millenial thinking. As I wrote in February,

The GOP is still fully engaged in Kulturkampf — Culture Warfare. This basic conservative political paradigm precludes the very possibility of rational discussion; Culture Warriors presume to know what is best because they have the authority of scripture (Leviticus or Milton Friedman; it’s all the same). Indeed, the word ‘authority’ is the key to understanding Culture Warriors: they are authoritarians, and they anoint themselves by the authority of gods. […] Why has the GOP become so shrill and banal? Quite frankly, they are victims of their own strategery (sic). By playing to the worst impulses of America for so long, they have internalized the inherent hypocrisies that their earthly gods — Reagan, Nixon, et al — used so cynically to gain political power. That power was its own end, and they were willing to wield it as a weapon against their political opponents. Indeed, to fully understand this moment in American politics, we must adopt the language of warfare. Whereas Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of politics by other means, Kulturkampf is the continuation of war by political means.

The Sotomayor vote demonstrates that for thirty-one of the remaining 40 Republicans in the Senate, open political warfare is more important than ‘bipartisanship.’ They see 2010 and 2012 as their ‘Last Stand’ against the tide of godlessness, and they’re more afraid of seeming “impure” than the electoral consequences of racist rhetoric.