When your politics are framed in terms of race, when they are molded by fear and articulated in terms of apocalyptic failure should your side lose, America has been damaged. When ideology becomes rigid, when what you know is spoon fed to you by shills with an agenda of doom, when ideology trumps civility, all Americans suffer.
When decent, civil conversation is clouded by mistrust, when compromise is seen as an untenable position, when you can't even agree what the issues are, the worst of American politics holds sway.
Clinging to intractable political ideology retards the process so even well defined problems get mired down in cheap point scoring in the hopes that somewhere, others will see what you see as disaster. This snuffs out the American optimism that has served this republic so well.
Clearly, the modern American Conservative fits these descriptions and fits them with a perverse pride. They themselves cannot see the forest of the ideological trees. After hoping against hope Obamacare would be struck down as unconstitutional, after vowing with all their might to defeat the president's bid for a second term, one might hope that their epistemological view might melt and some knowledge could seep in. But, alas, they are more than willing to stick to their views much the same way the old southern crackers stuck to their racism and hopes that the South shall rise again.