Your observations are similar to my experience as well. Conservatives I know are regular people who, I think, feel overwhelmed by things they don't understand and whose self-protection response to fear and change is anger. They essentially want to simplify the world by reducing diversity.

One thing that I find interesting about this group is that most of them used to stew relatively quietly until imposed upon. I think that the rise of social censure for politically incorrect speech has had a strong rallying effect on them. That's why people like Jordan Peterson went from zeroes to heroes on the right. I hate to say it, but I think we on the left made a huge tactical error by aggressively regulating speech through social censure. Obviously, conservatives have always been out there in large numbers, but the imposition of rather doctrinaire political correctness, combined with the connecting and "outing" power of the internet, has led to them becoming much more vocal and politically active. Now, the right and the left have become not just rivals but mortal enemies.

There are also the religious extremists who want to remake the world in the image of their holy book, but that's a whole other nefarious kettle of fish. They are rather cynically using the anger of the populist right to forward their agenda. There is no better example of this than evangelicals lionizing a moral retard like Trump.

Very true, the danger of the "other" is very easy to whip up some support against and create a sense of something to unite against.. scary how easy a populace is to manipulate