Are the Republicans all extreme right wing , or is there a wing with a more central position like we have in Australia in both our major parties?
Both parties in the US had a broad range of political views in the past, from conservative to liberal. The main difference between them wasn't in their political philosophy but in their constituencies. The Democrats broadly worked for labor and the workers, the poor and the middle class. The Republicans were the party that worked for the owners and the wealthy.
Both parties and the US in total were moderate. The conservatives in the Democratic Party were the southern racists and segregationists. They were in the party because of history, dating from the Civil War, when the Republicans waged war on the south. The liberals in the Republican Party were the silk stocking liberals like Nelson Rockefeller who were also in the party because of history, the Republicans were the party of the rich and of high duties to protect American industry. Both parties ignored the conservatives, there was never any doubt about what the conservative position would be on any subject, it was always "no." This was not considered to be constructive.
A series of events realigned the parties and the nation as a whole along ideological lines and shifted both parties to the right. First was the passage of the civil rights act in 1964 and of the voting rights act in 1965. This started a long process of separating the southern racists from the Democrats to join the Republicans.
Another was the Vietnam War which was supported by the conservatives, the moderates and the silk stocking liberals and opposed by a vocal minority of young college kids and the civil rights supporting blacks who were being asked to fight and die in the war, who found their political support as a minority in the Democratic Party among the liberals. The Democratic party slowly became associated with the anti-war liberals as it became more and more obvious that the Vietnam War was a mistake.
The third event that moved the parties and the country to the right was the decade long realization by the rich that they increasingly controlled the media as television became more important and newspapers and radio stations were consolidated into large companies. This allowed the rich to control the messages that people saw, read and heard to the benefit of the rich. For example, the rather bizarre, illogical construction that the poor should be given less money in wages so that they have the incentive to work harder to improve themselves and that the rich should be given more money in order to supply them with the incentive to work harder to improve the country.
The rich mandarins who controlled the Republican Party realized that they could realign their party into one solely dedicated to advancing the interests of the rich by making it into a conservative party centered around the southern racists who had been abandoned by the Democrats. This was dependent on three innate characteristics of conservatives. That they had been ignored for so long that they would just be happy to have someone pay attention to them and to listen to their unconstructive positions which always boiled down to different ways of saving "no." That conservatives need constant reassurance that their resistance to and fear of change is legitimate in a world of constant, rapid change, which requires a constant stream of lies to accomplish. And that conservatives can be made out of moderates by playing on their fears and in the US the easiest fear to use was racial, even if it was disguised as states rights or crime running rampant in the streets or part of the war on drugs.
The success of the Republicans moving to the right encouraged the Democrats to also move to the right in an effort to box in or to triangulate the Republican to try to gain the votes of the mythical independents. An effort doomed to failure because the votes of mythical people aren't cast and don't count. The lie of the independent voter is what people tell pollsters before they go into the voting machine and vote for the same people and the same party for whom they have always voted.
The movement to the right of the Democrats didn't box in the Republicans who just moved further to the right to where they currently reside firmly in the range of the reactionary, the people who want to rollback change, to take the country back to the 1950's or even earlier.
So the closest party to being a moderate party in the US is the Democratic party. But even they are largely right of center, not only in the largely useless effort to box in the Republicans but also because politicians are increasingly dependent on the rich for campaign contributions, as the influence of the labor unions wane and the rich gain more influence because money is free speech and corporations are people too.
