I grew up in a conservative household. Not a completely bonkers one (at the time), but Dad was a Bill Buckley fan and listener to the pre-Limbaugh, Bob Grant.
Some of the attitudes I remember from growing up:
The '60s protests are what happen when "you let just anyone go to university";
The glorious lost age of America was the Gilded age, when Great Fortunes were made, when the intercontinental railroads were built, when we became an industrial power (usually framed as "because government stayed out of the way" of industry, not that it aided and abetted it);
Woe betide anyone who refer to the great 19th century industrial magnates as "robber barons", because they got their noses out of joint over that. Those were Great Men, not to be gainsayed nor disparaged; etc.
The goals of the diehards of the Conservative Movement, the ones who have kept that agenda at the Republican forefront over decades, are to wipe out the last remnants of the New Deal and Great Society, to wipe out what's left of Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal and conservationism, to eliminate the income tax, to wipe out every program and policy developed over the course of the 20th century that helps ordinary people and shelters them, no matter how little, from being thrown to the wolves. Anything that recognizes a higher purpose than sending money skyward -- as much as possible, as fast as possible, as high as possible. They may have internal disputes over what point in the 19th century is their ideal, but they all want a Dickensian world. They have no qualms about a banana republic, as long as they're not the ones picking bananas.
With one exception: They like having a superpower military. They just want the peons to be the ones to pay for it.
These people set their sights on making the Republican Party into a conservative (as defined by them) party, and succeeded. Liberal/moderate Republicans, the so-called Rockefeller Republicans who accepted the broad outlines of the New Deal, were targeted for destruction. And during the late 70s and the 80s, that destruction was carried out. Any that weren't ousted were isolated, and replaced with "real" Republicans when they retired.
These are people whose ideology fits FDR's phrase of "economic royalists." They are believers in Divine Right. Not of kings (though they love a friendly autocrat), but in the Divine Right of Money. Anyone who impedes the unrestricted accumulation of wealth, who puts any priority over that, is against all that is Good and Right In This World and must be cleansed from the Earth.
Yeah, that's melodramatic and there are a whole lot of conservative foot soldiers who'll say "but that's not what I want", but it's what keeps driving zombie ideologies like supply side economics and the never-ending crusade to kill Social Security.
And their evangelical allies are on board too. They liked the days where they could use the law to enforce their religious doctrines.
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