“Did it get lost somewhere that this whole discussion about health care is about race, as well?” he asked Taylor Branch, the historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofParting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63. That book, the first of a civil rights trilogy, is thought by many to be the single most important work on a time in American history when Southern politicians spewed talk of “interposition and nullification” and made little effort to distance themselves from the vilest acts of the Ku Klux Klan.

Today’s racists are more subtle. For example, Rush Limbaugh, the radio voice of the radical conservatives, called the Affordable Care Act a civil rights bill that amounts to reparations.

“The people on the other side win a victory if they can have all of their politics be coded with race and not have to mention it,” Branch said, suggesting that some of the political opposition to the president’s health care law is rooted in the same rancid soil that produced resistance to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

When Branch talks about the “other side,” he is referring to the ranks of the radical, right-wing Republicans who control the U.S. House of Representatives. The Republican Party is the political base of a group of right-wingers who can best be described as “white resisters.”