What I see is an increasing pattern of right-wingers using the dregs of society (low-brow comedians, shock-jocks, degenerate rock stars - I'm looking at you, Nugent) to give themselves "street cred" among a certain set of voters.
Old-guard conservatives like wealthy industrialists and elitist snobs - the William F. Buckley types - cannot appeal to the demographic that the conservative movement now depends on. So they have increasingly made a devil's pact with degenerates whose political motives are beyond suspect. Ted Nugent, for example, isn't really a conservative in the Goldwater/Reagan/Buckley/Kirk sense. He probably has no clue who William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk were, and would punch them in the face if he met them. He's also a philandering, amoral, vulgar hedonist who is the antithesis of everything that the moralists like Buchanan, Robertson, and Falwell stand/stood for.
However, the Ted Nugents and Larry the Cable Guys are attracted to the Right simply because the values of the Left - equality, inclusiveness, feminism, and progress - are so disgusting to their little reptile brains. Not because they are actual conservatives.
So, having enlisted these morons in their quest to appeal to blue-collar male voters (an insult to good, hard-working blue-collar men, I might point out), they have allowed this knuckle-dragging, thuggish mentality to infect the right-wing message in general. The Right has become meaner as a consequence. Thus polite discourse has given way to death threats and the like.
Knuckle-dragging thuggishness has always been a vital component of right-wing ideology. It's kind of stupid to praise the "old Republicans" who were all just a bunch of hob-nobbing aristocratic filth who were always ready and willing to beat the ever loving s**t out of workers on strike, engage in ethnic cleansing to clear the West for white settlement, and invade small countries full of brown people to make sure that nobody got any funny ideas about defaulting on their debt repayments.
