The Republican Party is essentially a regional party dominated by white southern elites, a group observed keenly by Henry Adams:
The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind—fit for medical treatment, like other victims of hallucination,—haunted by suspicion, by idées fixes, by violent morbid excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were mentally one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree rarely known. They were a close society on whom the new fountains of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like oil on flame. They showed a young student his first object-lesson of the way in which excess of power worked when held by inadequate hands.
The Education of Henry Adams, chap. 7.
This is eerily like contemporary Congressional Republicans, and a warning if they should ever return to power.
