LATE EDIT: Sorry, Rob. This was in response to TB's post, but somehow it got filed under yours.

My experience with modern (my contemporaries, within my lifetime)conservatives was that as long as they thought they could get away with it, they fought against Civil Rights like demons. They also fought against everything else that threatened their right and ability to accumulate and harvest the labor of others without exposure or interruption; safety and health, labor law, welfare regulation, the social safety net, everything that might cost them a buck or give working men a break. Of course, once they've convinced themselves they've lost, they suddenly claim to have been for it "all along". Hell, these days, they've suddenly become the champions of Medicare and Social Security and are blaming the libs for trying to undermine it!

However, I'm not so naive as to think that they are all racists. In fact, I don't think racism has anything to do with it. Racism is just the way they recruit their useful idiot allies. I don't think the conservative power elite particularly hates Jews, gays, women, freethinkers, hippies or Darwinists, either. Their primary agenda is simply to make sure that no policy that is of the slightest inconvenience to their commercial ambitions gets a head start, and at the root of all their programs is that one single nugget of clarity. Haven't you noticed there's a glass ceiling at companies owned by women, too? (Nothing personal ma'am, it's strictly business.) They just know who their natural allies are and who they have to keep happy.