See Neocon and Paleocon below:
A Sean Wilentz article in the Oct. 16, 2005 NY Times Magazine made the following points.
"A generation of influential scholars claimed that liberalism was the core of all American political thinking. Well into the 1970's, many observers wondered whether a Republican Party that allied itself with the conservative movement could long survive.

He contends that the conservative movement started with the Whig Party of the 1830's and 40', which arose to power to oppose Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party after they destroyed the all-powerful Second Bank of the US. "The Whigs built a national following dedicated to protecting business and reducing federal economic regulation. By combining a pro-business conservatism geared to the common man with an evangelical Christian view of social virtues and vices, they won the presidency twice in the 1840's and controlled either the House or the Senate for most of the decade.

A century and a half before Reagan's election, the Whigs worked out the basic ideas of supply-side, trickle-down economics. They claimed the romance of risk and private investment and a compelling but simplistic view of America as, in one widely used Whig phrase, "a country of self-made men."

Parties realligned in the 1850's over the slavery issue. The Whig party collapsed; its anti-slavery wing joined the anti-slavery Democrats in the north to form the Republican party in 1854 after the Democratic party was taken over by the southern states.

In "Dixiecrats" at u-s-history.com they say:
"President Franklin Roosevelt's electoral body in 1945 had included a diverse, in fact contradictory, set of elements - both conservatives and liberals, northern and southern Democrats and Republicans. By 1948, however, the civil rights issue revealed the real philosophical differences between northern and southern Democrats as never before."

At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, some controversial new civil rights planks of racial integration and the reversal of Jim Crow laws were proposed for the party platform. 35 southern Democrats walked out in protest. They formed the States' Rights Democratic Party, which became popularly known as the Dixiecrats.

New York moderate Nelson Rockefeller's defeat in the presidential primary in 1960 election marked the beginning of the end of moderates and liberals in the Republican Party.

Clearer political and ideological lines began to be drawn between the Democrat and Republican parties as moderates and liberals converted from Republican to Democrat. Conservatives in the Democratic Party began to move to the increasingly conservative Republican Party.

The 1960's marked a shift in political ideologies.
Southern conservatives where Democrats because they didn't want to belong to the party of Lincoln after the slavery issue in the Civil war. They decided it was OK to be Republican after Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights act became the Republican candidate in 1964.
Another thing pushing southern conservatives was voter registration efforts in the 60's, which brought more African Americans into the Democratic party.
These two issues accelerated the transition from a solid South for the Democrats to one for the Republicans.

Neocon (Neoconservative) - A right-wing political philosophy that emerged in the United States from the rejection of the social liberalism, moral relativism, and New Left counterculture of the 1960s. In United States, they align themselves with most conservative values, such as free market, limited welfare, and traditional cultural values.
  The forerunners of neoconservatism were often liberals or socialists who strongly supported the Allied cause in World War II. Through the 1950s and early 1960s the future neoconservatives had been socialists or liberals strongly supportive of the American Civil Rights Movement, integration, and Martin Luther King, Jr.. As the radicalization of the New Left pushed these intellectuals farther to the right, they moved toward a more aggressive militarism, while becoming disillusioned with President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society domestic programs.
See wikipedia.

Paleocon (Paleoconservatism) - a term for an anti-communist and anti-authoritarian right-wing movement in the United States that stresses tradition, civil society and classical federalism, along with familial, religious, regional, national and Western identity.
See wikipedia.

See Movements below for things like Alt Right, White Nationalist, ...

Nate Silver's 5 categories for presidential candidates.

Source: Romney And The GOP's Five-Ring Circus | FiveThirtyEight

• Libertarian: Believes in civil liberties, supports a free market
• Tea Party: Believes in smaller government, lower taxes, fewer government-run programs
• Christian Conservative: Believes in socially-conservative values based on an interpretation of Christian beliefs
• Establishment: Believes in unifying the GOP by supporting a bit of all of the other four listed here
• Moderate: Believes in more liberal beliefs, typically on social issues, while still maintaining core GOP values

Movements:
Alt-Right - A set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that "white identity" is under attack by multicultural forces using "political correctness" and "social justice" to undermine white people and "their" civilization.  Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew "establishment" conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value.

See The Economist explains: What is the Alt-Right? | The Economist.
 
White Nationalist - At Wikipedia, Southern Poverty Law Center
Never Trump - Facebook
Organizations - News:
Americans for Prosperity
BrightBart News
Conservative Organizations


Unholly alliance (Conservatives - Christian Right - Anti-science)

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last updated 7 Nov 2016