Chuck Gray's recent fantastical editorial in the Tribune brought this to mind, along with letters to the editor every week accusing somebody of being a "RINO".
Parties evolve, but the parties themselves, and their members, don't seem to recognize this. This causes endless ironies in finger pointing exercises.
To listen to the current GOP in the state, everyone who is not a Trumpist is a RINO, a secret liberal Democrat or maybe even a Communist bent on the destruction of the nation. The populist right doesn't seem to realize here that 1) it's the new arrival in the state party; and 2) it's the new arrival in the GOP. Trumpist/Populist could in some ways be accused of being DUYs. . . Democrats Until Yesterday.
A quick look at this, using the unfortunate blue/red color scheme adopted by the American press as an example of misbegotten American Exceptionalism.
The History of the GOP
The Republican Party, had it not adopted that name, and had the "Liberal" "Conservative" monikers been around in 1854 when neck beard (truly) Horace Greeley gave them that name, was originally a center left to radical left party, and could have called itself the Liberal Party.
The party was anti-slavery (liberal) and pro-American System in terms of economics (liberal). That is, it took a radical view on human liberty, siding with natural law, and was in favor of state participation in the economy.
We'll skip the big early example of its policies, the prosecution of the Civil War in order to end the bondage of slavery, and go right to other examples. The GOP used the Civil War as an excuse to advance the American System, with the Transcontinental Railroad and the Homestead Act being the big early examples. It entered public life with the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862. Free of Democratic blocking, it could charge ahead with its concepts of equality and government sponsorship of industry. Following the war, it kept at it, with it being the party that sponsored civil rights and favored government interaction in the economy all the way up until the death of Theodore Roosevelt in January 1919.
During that period, it wasn't uniformly on the left. It was center left in the majority, with the far left in the party struggling to rise. The only time it really did rise was with the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt from 1901 to 1909. That brought Progressives to the forefront and they dominated the party. The split with Taft however caused a rift in which the Progressives bolted, and the Democrats adopted a Progressive platform.
Former mainstream Republicans came back in the party and even Roosevelt himself did, but the ball had been passed. With Roosevelt's death in 1919, the chance to revive it died as well. Dedicated Progressives became Democrats, where the movement was strong in the northern party, or joined more radical parties, with some becoming Socialist and some even joining Communist parties. The flame having burnt out, the party became a Conservative Party with the rise of Harding, dedicated mostly at that time to maintaining an imagined pre Great War sort of nation.
That's what the party became in earnest with the collapse of the Hoover Presidency and the Great Depression. The GOP was "conservative", but mostly in the sense of being against stuff. It was against the New Deal, it was against foreign involvement. It was against most of what Theodore Roosevelt had been for. It retained that basic instinct, which is in part why it lost elections in the 1930s, until the fall of China in 1949 when it was shocked into realizing that being against foreign involvement meant supporting the rise of Communism. At that point, it became anti Communist and supportive of foreign involvement. That meant supporting big government.
From 1949 until the election of Ronald Reagan, the GOP was mildly conservative, but only barely so. Discerning the difference between Republicans of the era and Democrats was not all that easy until around 1968 when modern Conservatism began to rise.
It was thinkers like William F. Buckley who began to give intellectual weight to the GOP in the 60s, with those individuals having a concrete philosophical concept of what being a Conservative meant. Still, it was the "Country Club Republican" who dominated the GOP from the onset of the Depression until some point in the 1970s. They were fiscally conservative, and in the 30s and 40s they were opponents of foreign entanglements. That was pretty much the extent of their ideology. Starting, as noted, in 1949, their anti Communism lead them to be in favor of taking on the Communist around the globe, although the Democrats were in favor of the same thing at the same time. In spite of Buckley and his fellow travelers, it wasn't really until the late 60s that an ideology really developed.
The first time it really showed up was in 1968. That's the same year the Democratic Party nearly split in two over the Vietnam War at Chicago. Republicans didn't split, they continued to support the war, and they were increasingly opposed to the rising liberalism in the Democratic Party, most particularly the rising social liberalism. The extra judicial opinion of Roe v. Wade in 1973 increased the party's discovery of Buckleyite conservatism and the financial crisis of the early 70s, fueled by the spending of Country Club Republicans and Democrats, increased it. The result was Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was the first really ideological Republican President since Theodore Roosevelt, although his wing of the GOP was not completely dominant. Country Club Republicans remained hugely influential in the party, and in essence they governed together as a more or less friendly coalition. Reagan Republicans yielded to Country Club Republicans again with both Bush's, who were also heavily influenced by Neo Conservatives, who were largely former Democrats or in some cases actually former Trotskyites.
Reagan, however, also brought into the Republican Party Southern Democrats, who were populists. Making a political calculation that this remaining body of conservative populists would abandon the Democrats as the Democrats had abandoned them brought the GOP into the South for the first time. It also, however, brought populist into the GOP for the first time since the late 1890s.
Populists would be a noisy distraction in the Republican Party throughout the Reagan and Bush years, but it was really the coalition of Country Club Republicans, Buckleyites and Neo Conservatives who controlled it. Starting with the second George Bush, it began to run into real problems as it could no longer gain the majority of the popular vote. It also tended to only give lip service to the populists, which tends to be the case for populism's history.
Donald Trump, whatever his merits or demerits, tapped into the populists, knowing that Republican and Democratic Populists, and they remained in both parties, were angry and completely disaffected. He brought them wholesale into the GOP, and they are his base. And now, for the first time in the country's history, they're able to control large parts of a political party nationwide.
Given the history of populism, the GOP should be worried.
Before we do that, however, how can we sum up the history of the Republican Party, so we can tell who are the dreaded RINO's and who are not. Well, thus:
- From March 10, 1854, until January 6, 1919, the Republican Party was the nation's liberal party, an period of 65 years.
- From 1919 until 1949, the Republican Party, the Republican Party was a conservative party, but one lacking an intellectual foundation, a period of 30 years.
- From 1949 until 1980, the Republican Party was a moderate center right party, a period of 31 years.
- From 1980 to 2016, the Republican Party was a Buckleyite conservative party, a period of 36 years.
- From 2016 to the present, a period of seven years, the GOP has been in a civil war between Buckleyite conservatives and populists.
