Both parties are amalgams of various groups whose support they must retain to win an election.
Prior to Reagan the two parties both held a large moderate middle where people might usually vote one way, but decide in this case to vote for the other party.
The Reagan campaign began a new approach of reaching out to a demographic that had always been considered out of bounds crazy: Extreme Christians. Once this group was added to the mix they had to be pandered to in every election so it became a Republican requirement to profess not only piety but tacit support for related craziness like groups who who support Israel because they believe it will hasten the apocalypse.
Through this channel the flood gates opened to the extreme “John Birch” types who include a great many unstable characters who live in an intellectual world of paranoid fantasies and right wing utopian philosophies. As the standards for acceptable party voters dropped, potential candidates had to endorse ALL these beliefs at least in a kind of euphemistic code understood by each group. Since the candidates had to match all these different camps they became more and more bland and uniform. Nobody could break away from any of the support groups for fear of being seen as a “Republican in name only”. And as time passed, the Republicans elected to office were true believers, replacing the lip service politicians who thought they could ride this tiger.
Republicans have always been good at just lining up and doing what they are told. But at the center of this thimblerigged mass were the moderate republicans. The most moderate of them had been partially annexed by Bill Clinton who declared a sea change in democrats that effectively cut off any candidates who would govern to the left of Richard Nixon. In fact Nixon was easily left of Clinton.
So Democratic candidates all had to fit a profile of satisfying the main machine of the base while not looking like they would be too helpful to the poor and disenfranchised. It’s easier to find candidates who can meet THIS criteria than that of the Republicans because rather than NEEDING to be extreme, they must not be.
So Republican candidates show up looking like a tray full of the same weird cookies. They must above all support the one percent while appearing hawkish and anti-abortion and deeply pious and anti-immigrant, etc, etc. And of course it would be even better if they could appear to represent some sort of compassionate or ethnic or female balance to this while not really doing so at all.
I believe the Trump effect is a revolution by a section of Republicans fed up with being forced into the weird, stitched up Frankenstein body of those needed to elect Republicans. This is why they love him saying weird shit and strutting around mooning the world, metaphorically speaking. It’s like someone coming off a grueling diet. They probably aren’t going to break their diet to eat rice and broccoli. They need some SWEET satisfaction.
Trump is the cookie that doesn’t look and taste exactly like all the cookies that big right wing money offered them this year and the Republican center of gravity grabbed that cookie and ran off with it.
You can see the ACTUAL people who run the Republicans looking on in shock as their remarkably loyal followers stop following.
