This diary began as a response to AndrewSshi's Unusual Bumper Sticker diary. It did not end there, and grew like topsy.

The McCain sticker on the Prius is an antidote to someone thinking the driver might be a Liberal. The driver might be secretly shopping at Whole Foods and surreptitiously eating arugula, too. Common sense and healthy food is mighty tasty, once it’s freed of its political associations. The bumper sticker keeps him from getting the finger from some redneck driving a ratty old pickup truck up from Galveston.

I left Houston a few months back, Bush home turf. Lots of McCain fans there, too. Let's face it: lots of people are just plain scared of Barack Obama. They phrase it carefully, saying "we just don't know this guy", but there's an aspect of palpable, sphincter-tightening fear to their view of Obama. Why is this so? I propose to answer it from my side of the fence, a child of Southern whites who went to Africa as missionaries but who were in their day the apotheosis of the Religious Right.

We now see Barack Obama tarred with the brush of guilt by association: apparently he knew Bill Ayers, a founding member of the Weathermen, a group violently opposed to the Vietnam War in 1969 and 1970. In those years, race riots were burning America to the ground and it was not just in the Segregated South. In little York Pennsylvania, white mobs assaulted and murdered blacks: when the blacks finally fought back in 1969, whole city blocks were torched. Barack Obama was then eight years old, halfway around the world, living in Indonesia, in the same time zone as Vietnam.

Long after Bill Ayers came out of the cold and was found innocent by reason of prosecutorial misconduct, he would meet up with Barack Obama, then a community activist on the board of a charity, dedicated to improving the education of children in Chicagoland. If guilt by association may be extended to all sins in all times to all we will ever meet, we are surely all guilty.

When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Right Act, he famously said, ''We have lost the South for a generation." In large measure, LBJ was right: Nixon would racially polarize the South and win his first term to the presidency. Bush the Elder held his nose and got into Texas politics with the segregationists.

But that’s only half the story: the Democrats lost the South because the white middle class wanted tax cuts and smaller government. When WW2 came to an end, a snapshot would have revealed around 40% of the South was in subsistence farming. The rural poor were LBJ’s constituency. But as the suburbs around Dallas and Houston and Atlanta grew, the dynamics changed. Farmland was paved over and became suburbia, expressways killed the little towns and the corner store died. A new constituency developed and it had no vision of rural poverty.

This new constituency was white, yes, but it wasn’t entirely white. Some blacks and Hispanics had done reasonably well. Bush the Elder represented a new expression of Republicanism, though this Connecticut Yankee was a most unlikely totem for this movement. LBJ’s Great Society was dead on arrival: it was twenty years too late. It would have worked, in the immediate aftermath of WW2, even after the Korean War, but by the middle 1960s the damage was done. A permanent underclass had developed. When it boiled over in rage and riots, the Republicans capitalized on the madness with a gospel of class based resentment against the anarchy of those days. White suburbia was given a battle standard and they went on punitive legislative raids on the Great Society, ensuring it would never truly enable anyone to rise from poverty.

Were these raids the actions of racists? I do not think so: Bigotry yes, racism no. Bigotry assumes many forms, and it is still with us. Black, Asian, Arab, Indian and Hispanic bigotry is no less pernicious: I have seen it in many quarters as the higher classes isolate themselves from the filth on the streets. In Central America, the rich routinely send their children to private schools in El Norte, los estados unidos. Miami is especially rife with this messy recapitulation of ancient hatreds. Even Africans indulge in it over here. It is the natural urge of mankind to burn the ladders upon which he climbed to success, lest he be forced to share the narrow ledge with others.

McCain and his people grin slyly while the 527s attempt to link Obama to Ayers. McCain might seem to be above the fray, but nobody’s fooled. He’s fearful, and his people are fearful. There’s only so far they can go with this line about Obama the Unready, for McCain has plenty of experience, including many horrible associations with unsavory characters. If we want perfection in our politicians, we should raise them in hydroponic gardens, for all the rest of humanity grows in the dirt.

It's not that McCain people really like McCain, any more than some of us like Obama. We’ve all got a few reservations about these guys. But McCain is the same old Hamburger Helper their wives have been bringing home for years and years. Yeah, it's greasy and boring, it's not even comfort food. They know it's gonna give them the same heartburn they always get from all that grease, and they'll take more political Zantac. They'd enjoy arugula if they ever got it in their salad, but they'd really rather have the same old iceberg lettuce and Kraft French they've been eating since they were kids. Less guided by ideology than force of habit, the McCain fans are more disposed to Suffer, while Evils are Sufferable, than to right themselves, by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.

The Republicans know they screwed up big time with GWB. They know Bush put the country further in debt, put the neighbors' kids in coffins, they went to the funerals. They bought that Prius, not because they're big Liberals, but because they can't afford the drive from the exurbs to Houston in the old Land Yacht.

The Republicans instinctively understand Obama will bring a day of reckoning. But they know all that Hamburger Helper with all that cheap watery hamburger meat is clogging their arteries and stirring the polyps in their colons toward malignancy. McCain delays the day of reckoning a while longer. McCain relieves them of the sensation of misery and guilt, like the Zantac they pop. McCain will fix what Bush screwed up. He's got Experience. They believe the fundamentals of Bush’s policy were good, it was just badly implemented. I wrestle with the next part of these Trotsky essays I’m writing, it’s slaying me. How could people who had suffered so terribly under the Tsar’s oppression turn so willingly to new oppressors? The wisest among them chose tyranny.

Will McCain be a tyrant? Not by choice. He’s as afraid of the future as his followers. Are they racists? They’ll loudly deny it, and in truth they’re not. But they are guided by old paradigms, and fear long-dead, irrelevant enemies. It’s not so much that they fear change, but they fear consequences and old habits die hard.

If Obama may be forever tarred by association with Bill Ayers, might we not also tar every modern Southern Republican with the truth they all owe a debt to the racist Dixiecrats who became the core of what now passes for Conservatism? Oh, Blaise, you will scoff, two wrongs do not make a right. That’s tu-quoque, Obama’s association with disreputable people goes to his character. We Republicans are no longer the Strom Thurmond Dixiecrats, we are the party of Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice. And it would be true to point out these changes.

But from whence arise these ancient slurs? You will kindly shut your pieholes, Republicans. You have much to answer for, historically and much to answer for in these times. You have trodden down the poor and lowly: your focus was ever more opportunity for your own. As our country evolved away from racism, honestly repenting for the sins of their fathers, the sons have entered into a far subtler bigotry of class and creed. You have huddled in your churches and your country clubs, insulating yourselves from the consequences of your inattention. Like the Priest and the Levite, you have passed by the man in the road, as if the Good Samaritan’s charity was a substitute for policy. It is monstrous hubris, your talk of Family Values. Much concerned for the rights of the fetus, you cram those undereducated and unwanted children first into crumbling schools then in due time into prisons full to bursting. You will kindly leave Bill Ayers out of this quarrel: his mission is to those very children. In the name of No Child Left Behind, you have taken Teddy Kennedy’s original bill, torn out the passages on funding, torn off its covers and let George Bush write his name in crayon on the flyleaf as if he was its author. This was your Education Policy: borrowed wholesale from the Democrats and gutted it like a steer hanging from a hook, enriching your own in the process. Stand aside: you have had your turn, not once but for two terms and you have failed to heal this nation. Government is not the enemy as Reagan said, nor is its power to be extended beyond every legal boundary as that scofflaw Bush43 has done. Government is what we are together.

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