Before the Internet, people talked politics in person and nuance was included. Communication was synchronous, with instant feedback, and basically required engagement. You couldn't just walk away without upsetting social norms.
But the Internet (and especially Twitter), changed all that. People don't want to discuss, they want to "win", so you get 1-sentence "owns" that are just straw men. Nuance gets thrown out the window. If someone you're arguing with comes up with an excellent point that you can't counter, it's easier to just not reply. You're not on the spot, facing a human, and having to admit out loud that they've got a point. Nope. Much easier to just ignore it and remain entrenched in whatever bullshit you believe.
The other half of the blame is 24-hour cable news that has to constantly come up with shit to show, and now entertainment and news have become intertwined with a disastrous result.
They used to have a a coherent positive viewpoint and policy to support it. And they sought to advance that policy through normal democratic means: convincing a majority of voters.
That has stopped being their approach. They no longer seek a genuine popular majority. They are turning inwards, adopting ever more extreme positions disconnected from genuine ideals. They seek only the power to impose their worldview on others.
They no longer feel constrained by long standing traditions and institutions. Any act is justified in their minds.
The decided exactly the opposite -- they elected Trump and decided to become a party based on white Christian grievance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_%26_Opportunity_Project
The Republican party is the party of unification and engagement. The Democratic party is the tent for everyone else. The presence of the former demands the existence of the latter.
The anti-LGBT party with a well-known track record of racism is the party of unification?
No...no it's not. They're the party, that when asked to NOT be anti-LGBT and not be racist, cries about their freedom being repressed.
The Republican party is the party of authority, tradition (Which is not necessarily a virtue), and conformity. They're the party of freedom, but only if you're a white Christian male, bonus points if you're rich.
The Republican seeks to oppress minorities, and then when asked to not be hateful, act like they're a victim of thought policing. They spew hateful messages on social media, get rightfully banned for it, and then pretend they got banned for their conservative views, which of course is pretty telling.
No, they're anything BUT the party of unification. They USED to be, but they let some loudmouth idiots become the face of the party.
Take for example the words, "In God We Trust; United We Stand." A christian conservative can read those words as a call for compromise around a shared identity; but the rest of us can read them for the threat that they are: either you are in the in group, or you are selfishly standing against it.
If the unification of the Republican voterbase wasn't working, Utah would have put 20% of its 2020 vote into an independent candidate, just like we did in 2016. That didn't happen. Instead, those voters became Trump supporters.
The sincere Conservative electorate had every opportunity to choose a less-sadistic option. They chose. OP's characterization is perfectly valid.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens in this time. He barely beat one of the least popular candidates in decades and then got crushed the next election cycle. Opposition candidates tend to do well when the economy is doing poorly, but he’s got a lot of baggage and the poles are dead even right now.
And so they vote for the party that is against rent controls, against expanding food stamps, and against raising the minimum wage?
Make it make sense.
"Think of it like a riot. What does smashing windows have to do with anything? Yet one follows the other."
Very few people have any idea about the causes of their suffering.
AKA, a lot of this is the result of generations of poor education, an education system that is strongly biased propaganda based on provably wrong economic models that tell k-12th graders that the best and only choice is the one where the free market runs roughshod over anyone who can't afford the rent, etc because that's simply "capitalism" and all the other choices are worse.
Remember, Trump successfully pressured the Fed to lower interest rates while the economy was strong. Think that contributed a bit to the inflation we've been dealing with?
Are they recommending corporate tax increases? New marginal tax brackets? No? Did they add tax loopholes for private jets and yachts while they were last in power? You bet!
No, what they're doing instead is trying to scapegoat things like "woke" college students and immigrants.
My parents don't want trans people to suffer: they want trans people to find happiness through the impossible avenue of just not being trans anymore. My parents don't want illegal immigrants to be incarcerated or murdered by border authorities: they want illegal immigrants to find liberty through the impossible process that is just becoming a legal immigrant, or living peacefully in whichever failed country they were born. My parents don't want people with substance abuse disorders to live and die on the streets: they want people with substance abuse disorders to overcome them through the impossible avenue of simply curing their own addiction without any outside support, safety, or encouragement whatsoever.
I cannot convince them that any of this is the case. On the other hand, people like Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, and Glen Beck can convince them of just about anything. Why? Because right-wing talking heads have a foot in the door: belief. They abuse every belief that a conservative holds dear, and turn it into engagement. Critical thought has no air to breathe in a world made of belief.
It doesn't matter what people want. It matters what people do.
Conservatives sincerely believe that government bureaucracies are less efficient than a free market economy. That's not a cover or a motte and bailey, it's legitimately and literally true. Conservative politicians dismantle government when given the opportunity because that's what their base wants them to do because, again, their base sincerely believes that the government is bad at most things it does.
It's true that Republican politicians (like most politicians) are mostly charlatans who are intentionally creating circumstances that reinforce the belief in the ineffectiveness of government, but OP's stereotype of conservative voters as simply wanting a "daily dose of other people suffering" is baseless, wrong, offensive, and extremely counterproductive.
This stereotype is a misrepresentation of the other core tenet of conservative philosophy, which is that what is right and wrong is not up to humans to decide, it comes either from God or from long-standing and proven traditions. Conservative opposition to LGBT rights and similar have nothing to do with wanting to see people suffer, they have to do with their deep-seated belief that some things are simply wrong because something greater than us has said so.
They can be wrong in that deep-seated belief, but it's unfair of OP to characterize it as sadism.