Lucian K. Truscott IV has an article up that's an interesting way to look at the Republican Party. I don't agree with all of it but I agree with some of it — mostly in the section I shall excerpt here…
Pundits are fond of saying stuff like, "Republicans used to stand for something." What they're talking about is an imaginary day in an imaginary past when the Republican Party "stood for" low taxes, small government, reducing the deficit and something called a "strong national defense," as if there had ever been a countervailing position by Democrats or anyone else that wanted a weak national defense.
It was all bullshit, the original Big Lie. They didn't stand for "low taxes." They wanted to lower the taxes of one group, wealthy people, while keeping taxes comparatively high on everyone else. They didn't stand for "small government." The size of the government grew in every single Republican administration going back at least to Eisenhower. Richard Nixon created an entirely new department of the national government, the Environmental Protection Agency, where there had been none before. George W. Bush created another, much larger division of government, the Department of Homeland Security, and bequeathed to it a budget in the tens of billions of dollars.
They didn't believe in "cutting the deficit." The deficit has grown by hundreds of billions in every single Republican administration, and under the last one, Donald Trump's administration, it grew by more than $2 trillion. As for a "strong national defense," the budget for the Department of Defense has grown steadily as a percentage of GDP under Republican and Democratic administrations alike without interruption since the end of World War II. We spend more on "national defense" than the rest of the world combined, making it hard to imagine that our national defense could possibly get any stronger no matter which party is in power.
Mr. Truscott loses me a little when he gets to the part about what it was Trump tapped into. But give it a read and see which part, if any, you like.