What's amazing is they were alive during the Cold War, by the looks of them.
Like true conservatism, the passing by of just a year or so flushes out their memory like nothing else can.
Nah, they're consistent. They're just tribal shitheels to their core and nothing more, especially when draping themselves in the flag while cursing out the other. Rarely done for altruistic reasons and more just bravado and arrogance.
Regardless of that, things
were different when they were young. Soviet Russia was very much a scare of "the left" and a rally around combating socialism by using it as a stick to beat on liberals.
Today, Russia is a mafia run state and a dreamland for white supremacists, anti-LGBT, pro authoritarians preaching to hate <x>, and far right types of all kinds. So basically their favorite people, same as it was decades ago in other countries *cough*pre-revolution Cuba *cough*. So yeah, they're just continuing the trend of Americans supporting far right tyrants. Fuck, we helped install a lot of them and all of this before most of us were born.
Continuing on that high thought, nothing in America's history screams consistent when you match our supposed ideals with our actions. It's why we required a brutal bloody civil war to end slavery instead of just following the principles of "every man is created equal" and all that other freedom shit apologists today still fool themselves into thinking was meant for all people.
So it all makes sense when you boil it down to its core parts - we're tribal creatures and where the tribe goes we go. This happens with quite literally everything so I'm not necessarily saying it's all bad though it typically is; more just that the tribe these guys fervently follow are literal fucking traitors and human cesspools. Deplorables is way too kind of a word.