I don't think their racist base is going anywhere, so I wouldn't count that as gaining anything. I am just going to assume it is stupidity until I see a cogent explanation of any possible benefit to anyone other than their own personal happiness levels rising from their cruelty to others...
I can offer you my opinion: Conservatives more than liberals are fixated by frightful, disgusting, and impure things. This is a genetic adaption that helps with survival in the wild. never take your eyes off that snake. But we evolved the capacity also to use language with it's capacity to create imaginary duality, this and that with names rather than thoughtless being in the now. So we can terrify ourselves by thinking. Thought is fear. It divides things and names them good and evil. All that has to happen is for a person in childhood to be told his actions are the actions of evil beings and he will become easily manipulated and conform to whatever pile of shit his or her parents or guardians believe in. Conservative Christians in Western culture, for example, fear being seduced by the devil and are always on the lookout he doesn't sneak off one of our shoulders and wisper into our ear, tempting us like liberal doctrine to comittee some terrible evil.
One a person has thoroughly absorbed this kind of ludicrous contempt for imaginary beings and the misery contemplating the hellfire that awaits you at any possible slip, you essentially have a life that has been destroyed on the possiblity of simple being joy. You can never relax or let down your guard.
Now all you need to do is see that misery loves company. People who believe ideas that fuck them fear anybody who is free from such fears. At the drop of a hat they could comit some terrible sin and do something wrong. They need to be threatened with terror so they behave and do not pose a threat. There must be only misery and nobody around who feels alive. The notion of happiness and freedom must not exist. They learned that very young as we all did to some extent.. For that reason I can't be confident you will hear any of this. Once there was a way to get back home... Does it still exist?