What’s a RINO?

Spend, as I do, some time reading political boards of a conservative bent and you’ll see the term RINO bandied about. RINO, short for “Republican In Name Only,” is a common aspersion directed at politicians who belong to the Republican Party but don’t espouse true Republican values. It’s most frequently used as a descriptor for the people who are part of what many call the Republican “establishment,” i.e. the people holding positions of power and seniority who espouse policies that aren’t necessarily to the liking of the declarants. Implicit in the derogation is the assumption that there is a set of true Republican values. When pressed, many will run off a list of conservative policy positions, some will mention the Constitution (although when pressed further, their fealty to that venerable document wavers if it gets in the way of something they want done), and many will name Ronald Reagan.

There’s a problem with the concept of true Republican values, however. The Republican Party is just that, a political party. The party consists of people who work together to advance a collection of policy planks, a collection that is neither consistent nor constant. The Party’s membership and the beliefs of that membership change over time, as people age, as people change, as politicians win seats, lose seats or retire, and as circumstances in the nation and the world change. Republicanism isn’t a principled philosophy like communism, socialism or libertarianism, it doesn’t have a guiding doctrine from which policies can be consistently deduced. It is what the party members say it is, with continuity provided primarily by “the old bringing in the new.” This, in practice, means that the label RINO will not be used in precisely the same way by different people. While there’s some consensus on which politicians are or may be RINOs, there isn’t a checklist or litmus test that can be applied outside consensus opinion.

That said, there are elements that will often coax “RINO” out of people’s keyboards, and they tend to be of two flavors: political sausage-making and big-government policies. There’s a long debate to be had about the tug-of-war between principles and compromising to get things done/dealing with realities of the moment – that’s a story for another day. It is the latter that interests me here. True Republicans, we are to believe, are in favor of smaller government and less government involvement in our lives. Sounds great, except that in practice the politicians who comprise the Republican Party rarely deliver on either and often deliver the opposite of both. Sometimes this is part of the aforementioned sausage making, but there’s ample evidence to support the premise that they actually like government.

Fifteen years ago, in the summer of 1999, George W. Bush gave his first major campaign speech, The Duty of Hope. In it he offered up his vision of what came to be know as compassionate conservatism, a vision that included efforts by government to encourage and facilitate the activities of private charities AND efforts to coordinate private charitable activities with governmental efforts. He also made a couple observations, which I quote:

There is another destructive mindset: the idea that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved. An approach with no higher goal, no nobler purpose, than “Leave us alone.”

I know the reputation of our government has been tainted by scandal and cynicism. But the American government is not the enemy of the American people. At times it is wasteful and grasping. But we must correct it, not disdain it. Government must be carefully limited, but strong and active and respected within those bounds.

Both of these statements make clear that Bush believed not only that government can be directed to good ends, but that it should. His speech and his presidency had a lot of “big government” about them, no matter that he declared government “must be carefully limited” (I heard a lot of the same stuff come out of Mitt Romney’s mouth, but, as before, a topic for another day). Contrast these with three Ronald Reagan quotes:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Do these sound like the words of someone who felt government could and should “do good?” Reagan, in these quotes, espoused a philosophy very different from Bush’s. Reagan’s view of government was not that it could and should be used to solve problems, but that it’s the source of problems.

Both Reagan and Bush served as Republican governors, both were Republican presidents for 8 years, both led the party and shaped its positions and policies. Is one more “Republican” than the other? Conservatives hold Reagan up as a paragon of Republicanism, but what makes him more “Republican” than Bush? One can use the phrase “Reagan Republican” and have it mean something, but “Reagan Republican” is a term out of history as much as or more than it is an ideology. It’s a backward look and a desire for a leader and a government that acted under a very different set of circumstances than exist today (and usually a desire for only the “good” parts of that past leadership and government). Even given that, though, it’s a better label than RINO.

People who self-identify as Republicans and who use RINO in a derogatory fashion to describe the current crop of GOP politicians are engaging in an appeal-to-antiquity fallacy. By declaring that certain members of the GOP are RINOs and by extension that others are true” Republicans (often finding the definition for the latter in the past), they’re asserting that there are correct and incorrect policy positions for those who wear a GOP hat to espouse, and that those who more closely adhere to the correct positions are more legitimate Republicans than those who do not. The party itself, however, begs to differ, as do the voters who elected those RINOs. The Republican Party is what it is, its members have been elected and have risen to their relative positions of power by the rules of our system, and no label will delegitimize it or them. People who use RINO want the GOP to change. While they’re not the only ones, RINO-users couch their desire for change within a declaration that the GOP should become what it’s supposed to be, and in doing so attempt to argue that their wants carry more weight than others.

Lots of people want the GOP to change. The case is strong that the Republican Party has been part of, as Reagan put it “the problem.” It has been complicit in the expansion of government, of the degradation of our liberties, of reckless and wanton spending, and in many other things that have brought the nation to its current difficult state. It’s fair to want politicians to be more in the mold of Reagan (or, even better, Goldwater) but simply tagging someone a RINO because his policies differ is either idealized meaninglessness or sophistry intended to legitimize and prioritize one’s beliefs above those of others.

I’ve gone a long way to make a simple point: Stop using RINO. It’s not a strong argument, it’s not particularly meaningful, and it isn’t clean logic or argument.