What Eric Hoffer said about every great cause starting out as a movement, becoming a business, and ending up as a racket was as true of establishment conservatism as anything else, with one exception. It seems as though after 1988, it skipped the business phase and went straight to racket.
They could only keep the racket going because the alternative was always marginally worse, i.e. nobody of sound mind voted "for" Bush, Dole, Bush, McCain, or Romney, they voted against Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama. Trump was the first general election candidate with a vision and an enthusiastic base of support since Reagan. Most of Trump's supporters didn't just vote against Hillary, they voted for President Trump.
In 2016, for the first time in a generation, we didn't have to hold our noses as we voted.