What Is The Modern Republican Party?

Paul Campos links to a Paul Krugman piece that makes a series of important points. 

First, idiots like Jacob Wohl and James O'Keefe have grown up inside the hothouse atmosphere of Fox News/Breitbart/NewsMax.  They are incapable of seeing the world through any other lens.  Pizzagate and Benghazi aren't crude tactics to gain electoral advantage: they are the gospel truth.  When confronted by actual standards of objective reality, their work crumbles.  This does not bode well for the future of the "Conservative Movement."

Secondly, the GOP, post-Reagan, has assumed that the popularity of their party rests on the popularity of their policies, that what their voters really want is to roll back the regulatory state and give more money to the capital class.  What Trump has exposed is that what Republican voters really like is Hippie Punching and Minority Suppression.  "Owning the Libtards" is pretty much the only consistent position Donald Trump has taken.  Voter Suppression is now enshrined in GOP politics.  More and more naked appeals to racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric are staples of current Trumpist strategy.

What Paul Ryan woke up to (and why he's slinking off to K Street before voters can kick him out) is that no one cares about his Ayn Rand fetish for slashing social services.  Those WWC voters who support the GOP want their stuff.  They want Medicare and Social Security and schools and roads and all sorts of stuff.  As long as brown people don't get them, too.

As the "Small Government Conservative" fades from the political landscape, what takes his place?  What happens once the GOP is ONLY left with racism and ethno-nationalism?

Terrifying.