"The Party of White People"

"Central to this cynical stratagem was the devolution of the GOP's governing classes from guardians of party principle into servants of the wealthy. Beginning in the 1980s, the GOP was captured by a 'free-market' agenda laser-focused on diminishing regulation, reducing taxes, gelding unions, slashing employee benefits, promoting corporate consolidation, gutting antitrust law, and maximizing shareholder value by offshoring jobs, suppressing wages, and firing workers.
"Once tax cuts and cosseting corporations became the GOP's raison d'être, to preserve its electoral viability the establishment increasingly jettisoned the party's traditional agenda to accommodate fundamentalism, economic nationalism, xenophobia, white identity politics, cultural resentment, anti-elitism and an undifferentiated loathing of government. Slowly but inexorably its longtime stalwarts—the internationalists; the free traders; the deficit hawks; the social moderates; the pro-immigration reformers; the advocates of compromise and prudent stewardship—were marginalized to placate the ever-more-volatile base. Instead of looking forward, the party marinated in visceral nostalgia for an imaginary white folks' paradise."

At The Bulwark, Richard North Patterson explains what happened to the Republican Party.