Sounds like some deeply, deeply internalized self-hatred going on there.

I'm a school bus driver and I work with a few Trump-supporting lesbians. It's no mystery why: they really, really hate black people and that hatred blinds them to any possible conception of their own self-interest. For good measure they're also staunchly pro-union.

Most people will not admit to themselves that they are wrong.

It’s as simple as that.

We are all most people about something.

I question his fitness for office if he had no clue, they aren't shy about these beliefs and they have gotten less shy post trump.

To give this dude credit, from the rest of the quote in the article it sounds like he's genuinely standing up against this sort of hate, and I expect it's at a very tangible personal cost. I find it almost unbelievable that anyone who genuinely opposes hate of a sort that's become a part of the absolute fabric of modern conservatism could still be a Republican, but apparently this dude is the exception. I hope he has the sense to get out now, but I'll take what genuine progress I can get given I've largely written off most conservatives as a lost cause.

No he didn't:

...and arguing that they don't represent Republican views.

He's still in fucking denial.

Don’t be too impressed. He still a Republican.

Part of the effectiveness of the Republican Party as an institution is creating these little hot-house varieties of conservative that get to pretend they're secretly running things while everyone else is being made a useful idiot.

The billionaire plutocrats think they're outwitting the evangelicals. The evangelicals think they've corralled the neocons. The neocons are convinced they've duped the suburanites. The suburbanites are convinced they've carved out a Lebensraum that's safe from the ravages of corporate capitalism. Everyone is selling one another a bill of goods and hoping to get their slice before the pie is handed back to the Democrats.

The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, n*****, n*****.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*****”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, n*****.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

This is the foundation of the current Republican party. There is nothing redeemable.

I used to believe the Republican party brought much needed conservatism to the table. There were reasonable concerns that the Democratic party was too heavy handed with implementing morality and over reaching laws. The Democratic party has mostly been in the right side of social permissivness since then and the Republican party has gone fucking crazy Reactionary which they have rebranded as "Conservative". It has become an intersection dynamic where the Democratic party has become a coalition of progressives and conservatives, who just to want to keep the rights they have. Unfortunately there are many "Team R" fans that don't recognize that their party no longer represents them.

So short answer, the Democratic party has already absorbed the strengths of the Republican party.

And democrats: is there any republican strength that you wish your party would implement?

We had 8 years of Obama where he tried to meet them in the middle and that was a flop. I don't even know what they really stand for as it's always shifting. The only concrete things seem to be hurting other people. I ones I know in my personal life genuinely believe that things are only bad because the media keeps bring up police violence and inequality.

You should just read what the Republicans will do if Trump is reelected.

They've published their plans, and I want exactly zero of any of the "policy" they plan on implementing.

I wish Democrats were willing to put in the same amount of endless, ceaseless planning and toiling and preparing so when an opportunity arises, you can snatch it up. Republicans did this with the Supreme Court, with religion in schools, etc etc etc. Last time Democrats had both Houses and the Presidency, we got barely anything (to my memory at least).

I wish Democrats had an ounce of Republicans' ability not just to shape narratives, but to conjure them from thin air and still dominate the news cycle.

I wish Democrats were as willing to bend to the extremists in their own party as the Republicans do. That's a real monkey's paw wish right there, but at the moment the extreme right is literal fascists and the extreme left just wants the cool quality of life stuff the Nordic countries already have.

Speaking personally... yeah we ARE divided here in the US. It kind of IS that bad. There are a lot of reasons for it, but in my mind the biggest thing is the legacy of slavery in this country. It's not a scar... it's still bleeding because bigots keep picking the scab. There's been so many knock on effects from it that have gone unexamined and unaddressed because there are enough bigots to be a stupid but effective voting block.

I just searched for what the US Republicans actually want:

The positions of the Republican Party have evolved over time. Currently, the party's fiscal conservatism includes support for lower taxes, gun rights, government conservatism, free market capitalism, free trade, deregulation of corporations, and restrictions on labor unions.

No, absolutely no redeeming qualities here.

Courtesy of Roger Ailes and the invention of political talk radio, The United States was the breeding ground for media manipulation tactics that later arrived in Europe, and those have been most heavily utilized by right-wing actors -- think Sky News/The Daily Mail/The Sun in the UK, or instance. When you poll most people about what they want out of government here in the US, they tend to be in alignment with "liberal" values in the US or center-left parties in Europe, but when you ask them if they support implementations of those values by name (i.e., "Social Security" or "Medicaid" or "food stamps" instead of just asking "should the government help needy people stay fed and healthy?" people who consume right-wing media suddenly flip to be against those policies, because they are brainwashed by their media diet to oppose them even though in principle they express support for them.

Bottom line, after almost forty years of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and thirty years of Fox News deliberately manipulating the American right to become hateful and reactionary in spite of their own natural impulses, the gap between left and right has become incredibly difficult to bridge in any meaningful way. IMO, the only hope for reconciliation is to push those extreme voices out of the mainstream in order to limit their ability to influence the gullible, and there's just not many viable mechanisms to do that.