Playing consensus politics with the left

Lawrence Auster has been posting a steady stream of excellent commentary on the Tucson shooting at VFR. One of these posts highlights a breakthrough moment by a mainstream conservative journalist. This journalist, Brit Hume, has come out and openly stated that the American left commonly considers disagreement with its politics to be motivated by hate:

It has become a habit of the American left to equate disagreement with liberals and liberalism with hate. So convinced do they seem of the virtue of their cause that the only possible explanation for resistance to it must be hatred.

Why is it significant that a mainstream conservative journalist has openly recognised this? Lawrence Auster goes on to explain as follows:

Of course you will find this kind of insight into the left's mindset at VFR all the time, but you will never hear it from mainstream conservatives. The reason you will never hear it from mainstream conservatives is that it borders on saying that the left is not a normal American political movement but a tyrannical ideological movement at war with conservatives and seeking their suppression; and if we acknowledge that the left is at war with us and seeking our suppression, then the American political system, based on consensus and shared loyalties, starts to break down, in which case mainstream conservatism itself, based on belief in that consensus, starts to break down. So for an establishment conservative like Hume to say what he said above represents a significant step toward the forbidden truth of contemporary politics.

It's a clear enough point. How can the right play consensus politics when the left views the right in such implacably hostile terms as being motivated by nothing more than hatred and bigotry?

One of the most visited left-wing websites is Daily Kos. Its founder, Markos Moulitsas, has written a book titled American Taliban which aims to show that:

the Republican Party, and the entire modern conservative movement is, in fact, very much like the Taliban. In their tactics and on the issues, our homegrown American Taliban are almost indistinguishable from the Afghan Taliban. The American Taliban ... share a litany of mores, values, and tactics with Islamic extremists.

Moulitsas admits that progressives hate conservatives:

Progressives hate the Taliban and other Islamic fundamentalists precisely for the same reason we hate rabid conservatives at home: their fear of change, their contempt for nontraditional lifestyles, their mania for militaristic solutions, and their fascistic efforts to impose their narrow worldview on the rest of society.

The thought of separation between "progressives" like himself and the conservatives he hates appeals to him:

I’m partial to ceding a portion of the Texas Panhandle to these wackos, naming it Dumbf--kistan, taking it off the federal dole, building a wall around it, and arresting anyone trying to enter America illegally. I can always dream.

Has Moulitsas correctly categorised the mainstream right here? No, of course he hasn't. Much of the mainstream right is right-liberal. In other words, much of the mainstream right shares the same underlying philosophical assumptions held by Moulitsas himself. That's one reason why mainstream politics has held together up to now.

But Moulitsas doesn't see it this way. He categorises "the Republican Party, and the entire modern conservative movement" as not only non-liberal, but as radically so. He believes that the entire modern conservative movement is to be equated with the current national enemy, the Taliban: the enemy the nation is at war with.

All of this fits with Lawrence Auster's description of leftism, as represented by the likes of Moulitsas, as being an "ideological movement at war with conservatives and seeking their suppression".