With the rightward drift, the Republican Party’s dedication to wealth and privilege has become so extreme that its actual policies could not attract voters, so it has had to seek a new popular base, mobilized on other grounds: evangelical Christians who await the Second Coming,6 nativists who fear that “they” are taking our country away from us, unreconstructed racists,7 people with real grievances who gravely mistake their causes,8 and others like them who are easy prey to demagogues and can readily become a radical insurgency.
