Contempt

It's certainly true that conservatives exhibit nothing less than contempt towards the rest of us.  Are liberals the same in their attitude towards conservatives?  Some of us are, but it's easy to fall into error here.  What we're dealing with aren't ...repeat are not...  "conservatives." "Conservative" doesn't include decimating the nation for the sake of 10% of its people.  As Paul Krugman and many others continue to point out, that's what current Republicans are laying out as policy.

The last remaining shreds of conservatism left Washington some time back.  The Republican party is left with radicals and political castrati.   They don't really have a party.  They have people in silly hats hanging around and talking like space cadets waiting for the fun to start.  Desperation seems to be the glue that holds them together.  Obstruction is the form of exercise they choose to keep some muscle. 

Paul Krugman catches the flavor of their bitterness and how it shows itself in their interactions with the media.

Rising unemployment claims demonstrate laziness, not lack of jobs; rising disability claims represent malingering, not the real health problems of an aging work force.

And given that worldview, Republicans see it as entirely appropriate to cut taxes on the rich while making everyone else pay more.

Now, national politicians learned last year that this kind of talk plays badly with the public, so they’re trying to obscure their positions. Paul Ryan, for example, has lately made a transparently dishonest attempt to claim that when he spoke about “takers” living off the efforts of the “makers” — at one point he assigned 60 percent of Americans to the taker category — he wasn’t talking about people receiving Social Security and Medicare. (He was.)

But in deep red states like Louisiana or Kansas, Republicans are much freer to act on their beliefs — which means moving strongly to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted.

Which brings me back to Mr. Jindal, who declared in his speech that “we are a populist party.” No, you aren’t. You’re a party that holds a large proportion of Americans in contempt. And the public may have figured that out. ...Paul Krugman

Until the Republican party of the most recent Republican primary season is gone, their contempt towards the rest of America will continue to be how we know them.