They are presently viewed by the moderate majority to be mostly about defending the interests of the corporate capitalists, ie. the rich. In my experience over the past 30 years, more and more people are beginning to name runaway corporations as what ails us, both domestically and in our foreign policy.
If our social stratification was not continuing to grow, maybe the republicans could advance the perfectly sound conservative principles which orbit the idea of the primacy of the individual, but given the stagnation of real wages and the shrinking of the middle class, no one wants to hear the rich being defended.
