Jane Coaston, in the New York Times:
What my time at that student paper taught me is that conservatism has long had two faces — one for its ideological elites and another for its voters. Its intellectual class debates free markets and constitutional law, but the message for voters is consistently different, full of sinister socialist plots and black welfare recipients soaking up tax money…
…
But this dynamic had been clear for at least a decade. From my first year of college to the weeks in which, as editor in chief, I closed my final edition of the paper, I came to a realization: Whatever conservatism told me it was intellectually — whatever ideas we discussed, whatever policy papers I read — could never compete with what conservatism was in practice. At the conferences the Collegiate Network sent me to, no one was discussing tax policy or the nature of effective governance; they were debating whether Barack Obama was a “real” American and whether Sarah Palin could unseat him in 2012, based on pure and unfettered loathing. Nothing was being conserved.
Conservative voters have known this for some time. This is why they voted last year for a president who swore not to preserve but to upend. Since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for the presidency, Republicans have worked to maintain a two-tiered party — one for the ideologues who believed in Burke and Buckley, free markets and free minds, and one for the voters, who are often moved less by a system of ideas than by id and grievance. It was always the voters, though, who really mattered. And it was the voters who won.
The “Southern Strategy” that Nixon ran on led to a massive constituent shift, with the substantial bulk of white racists (of varying degrees) fleeing the Democratic Party. Reagan, and every GOP president since, has used racially-coded white-identitarian appeals during campaign season in order to keep its shaky coalition of conservative ideologues and paranoid white middle class members voting together, only to ease up on the extremism after getting into office, which no doubt explains some of the anti-elite backlash.
But whether the racism of the GOP could have been slowly undone, the concurrent rise of the jingoist, reactionary “right-wing” media echo chamber, along with decades of failure of elites (on both sides) to argue for and provide adequate economic opportunity, made Trump inevitable. So for the time being, we’re stuck with a Republican Party that’s been radicalized and is increasingly cozying up to its violent extremists. The real conservatives need to take the party back, but that’s going to take time because there are so few moderate voices left, and they may not be able to make enough of a difference without addressing the lingering racism in the party, or taking on the worst of the fake news industry which has a stranglehold on truth among a large proportion of the GOP base. The Democratic Party is deplorable, too, but for now, the GOP is so extreme that it simply needs to be voted out of office, at least at the federal level.