It’s possible to be a good Conservative.
Mainstream Republicans are not Conservative.
Mainstream Republicans are either Reactionary or so far gone with ignorant tribalism they don’t have a cogent political ideology. (Or, perhaps better: The cogent ideology they do have is cultural, not really political.)
It breaks down like this: A Conservative is someone who wants measured change, because they think that the current setup is, on the whole, fairly workable, and needs to be patched and improved, not scrapped. They also aren’t teleological, in that they don’t think there’s an end-point to history (pacem Fukuyama) the way Marxists do: A Conservative is different from a Fabian in that the Fabian is actively working towards Socialism, which they believe to be the end of history in political and historical terms, the point all history is driving towards as per the warmed-over Hegel Marx was enamored of.
A Reactionary wants to go back to some past state, undoing progress made and recreating some imagined utopia before Those People got their filthy hands on it and perverted the Eden we once had.
A Progressive wants to redo large sections of society but leave the roots untouched. They want faster change, but don’t want to dynamite the whole thing.
The GOP has been a Reactionary party ever since it absorbed the people who wanted to turn back the clock on Civil Rights. It’s drifted a bit further in that direction since then, but, more importantly, it’s become a tribal affiliation for what’s often called the Moral Majority, the Purity Cult Christians who think the biggest parts of Jesus’ message were obedience to sexual laws and keeping the household under control of the patriarch. These people see the modern state of sexual laws post-Griswold (yes, Griswold: the decisions you’ve heard of (Roe v Wade, Lawrence, Obergefell) all rely on Griswold v Connecticut) and post-coverture and see a society which is utterly, irredeemably broken, and which must be destroyed root and branch before it is ritually pure again. These people are called single-issue voters, that issue being abortion and/or marriage equality, but it goes deeper than that: Even if the Democrats went 180° on abortion but kept their opposition to school prayer, marital rape, and everything else which separates us from The Handmaid’s Tale, they’d still see the Democrats as pure evil.
The other part of the Red Tribe the Republicans represent is Gun Nation, the people who see guns as part of a larger way of life including the Right To Revolt and, therefore, see any attempt at gun control to be equivalent to taking away their ability to control the government. In a way, they’re right: They’re a minority, and in any system which even pretends to represent groups fairly, they wouldn’t have much control over Federal affairs. But their guns don’t give them the control they currently have: Gerrymandering does that, along with their alliance with the Moral Majority.
So, who speaks for the Conservatives? Most of the Democratic Party, which is also the party a lot of the Progressives fell in line with, which is part of the reason Hillary vs Bernie got so heated, even though Sanders was never so Progressive as he was painted. The other part is simple sexism, which, no, wasn’t entirely due to the Russians, although they likely had a hand in it.
Jews were persecuted. Changing ‘Republicans’ to ‘Nazis’ would make far more sense.