Why are Republicans/Conservatives embracing fanaticalism these days?
America has always rejected fanaticism, especially since WWII. We are supposed to be E pluribus unum -- out of many, ONE. Now, the right wants America to be E unum pluribus -- out of ONE, many.
Only stable conditions, equaliberiam or entropy deradicalize.
Social was a flash point. Large parts of society interacted for the first time. Echo chambers formed, energy level increase, radical leave the bubbles and new groups militerize in defense.
It made less sense to people out of the loop though. Nazis, antifa, police are raciest, lgbtq, Christian nationalism, socialism, etc. All of these ideas were subcultures that grew bubble online cause they could (much like the Arab spring), and the radicals that formed and took action made big moves from everyone else's ignorance.
The majority didn't have the means, and frankly still don't, to hold the concepts or ideas as unique groups so instead they mapped onto the two party system warts and all. Because "right wing" was Republican the opposing side told everyone "right wing" is Republican. So Republican had to either disavow or defend them, but when these groups wanted to act politically they had almost no choice but to fit in predefined parties.
Its been mostly good, that's the crazy thing, gay rights, trans rights, police reforms, the DoJ has how many anti trust cases going on now?, how unions are forming?, etc
I was going to say radicalism (as a political concept) refers to the practice of looking for the root causes of society's ills as opposed to merely fixating on (if we're going to be charitable about it) superficial ones as reformist and reactionary politics would have us to do, and this makes radicalism an inherently left-wing thing and something reactionaries (and most of their reformist allies) will take extreme measures to prevent - including completely handing the state and it's repressive apparatus over to reactionaries (ie, what we call fascism today).
But you know what? This...
Radical is just further left than reformer.
...is, so far, the only half-way decent response I've ever had to this in about five year's time - so I'm just going to leave it as is.