Certainly a historical understanding unclouds the picture. That Vox video kb posted is excellent. I have several contentions with the modern Republican party as epitomized by Arthur C. Brooks and Ted Cruz, though now that Trump is the ringleader I'm not sure where the ideological center is anymore.

It's not just that a large portion of the party is comprised of thinly veiled (and out-in-the-open) racists, or that for the last 6 years they employed the strategy of obstructing government and used the resulting trainwreck as proof-positive that now we need less of it. My primary contention is the inanity of an argument for a limited government. Limited government sounds--on the face of it--awesome, in the Madisonian sense of people pursuing happiness. But the discourse lacks any acknowledgement on the part of the GOP that an uncorrected political economy (the "market") fails. It fails reliably, predictably, without governmental oversight. Not just in natural concentrations of power epitomized by monopolies or oligarchies, or the informational asymmetries that arise between consumer and producer, though these failures can be trouble enough. It's the environmental degradation that the party doesn't even acknowledge the scientific reality of that infuriates me. It's a "limited government" in the hands of people nakedly contemptuous of science and rational inquiry.