I'm not sure people realize just how dire this is. The politics of the largest, most powerful country on Earth are dominated by people who truly believe in dispensational premillenialism [2]. For these people their time on Earth is limited. Wrecking the Earth doesn't matter. The afterlife is forever. Senior government officials take seriously bringing on the apocalypse through a red heifer [3]. In fact, it's the cornerstone of Christian Zionism [4].
And what began this political movement? Racism [5], specifically a ruling that schools in the South couldn't be both tax-exempt and segregationist.
I don't know about that. The GOP has been talking about the southern strategy for a while now, before the world wide web was even a thing. Our current neoliberal economies are starting to show how bleak the world they ushered is, creating social unrest from the huge inequalities that arose, that populists can easily exploit for political gains. It's the same story as all fascist takeovers, really.