Well that was certainly eye opening, and not in a good way. Begs the question of how the party has ever been able to unite such a diverse group of delusional and hateful people with out the whole group completely thunder-doming themselves.
They have a uniting principle:
“We deserve to rule, being the heirs of privilege. The world is not fair, and we will keep it that way so that we can be on top.”
Reactionaries see the democratization of rights as an assault on them; to them, rights are zero-sum. If someone else (especially a group they’ve coded as “evil”) gets a right recognized, they see it as a personal affront.
One can see this streak throughout history for the reactionary right: freeing the slaves, ending Jim Crow, women’s suffrage, same-sex marriage, etc.
I don’t think it’s even about ruling, it’s about needing to feel superior to . . . someone. Decades ago there was a wonderful article titled something like “Who Are You Better Than?”. It talked about how people who know they are not, and never will be, members of the ruling class desperately need groups of people they can comfortably point to as being “beneath them”. As long as they aren’t at the bottom they can feel good about themselves.
In the book The Reactionary Mind, the author argues that conservatives either need to be either able to strongly identify with the movement leader or to reserve a portion of that power for themselves as a paterfamilias or an owner of capital.
