Senior editor for The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it all in a nice neat package: Proud Of Being Ignorant.

A lot of you have e-mailed me to note that Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has decided to honor  those who fought to preserve, and extend, white supremacy. I don’t really have much to say. The GOP is, effectively, the party of willfully unlettered Utopians. It is the party of choice for those who believe global warming is a hoax, that humans roamed the earth with dinosaurs, and that homosexuals should work harder at not being gay. 

That the party of unadulterated quackery also believes that Birth Of A Nation is more true to the Civil War than Battle Cry Of Freedom, is to be expected. Ignorance does not respect boundaries. It is, at times, qualified and those who know more, often struggle to say more. But people who believe that the Census is actually a covert attempt to put Americans in concentration camps, are also likely to believe that slavery was incidental to the Civil War. 

This is who they are—the proud and ignorant. If you believe that if we still had segregation we wouldn’t “have had all these problems,” this is the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. If you flirt with secession, even now, then this movement is for you. If you are a “Real American” with no demonstrable interest in “Real America” then, by God, this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair tonic, is for you.

Well said. The GOP is the party of creationists and climate change deniers; nearly every major GOP politician is anti-science, because they know they won’t get any votes if they don’t toe the right wing line. And increasingly, the barely suppressed racism inherent in this atavistic world view is bubbling to the surface, as we see today in Virginia.