Conservatives Are The Real RINO’s

Leo McNeil ^ | January 5, 2015 | Leo McNeil

[LeoMcNeil]

When Jeb Bush announced he was running for President conservatives accused him of being RINO. (Republican in name only) Conservatives have said the same thing about Mitt Romney, Chris Christie and a laundry list of moderate to liberal Republicans. The fact though is that the progressives in the GOP aren’t the RINO’s. The Republican Party was founded as the party of big government in 1854. They were the remains of the Whig Party, which at the time was the party of Hamiltonian big government. It was the Democrats who favored Jeffersonian small government. The RINO’s aren’t big government progressives, the Republican Party has always been their party. The RINO’s are conservatives who have been trying to find a landing place since FDR began pushing us out of the Democrat Party.

If we look at the last 60 years of Republican Presidential nominees we can only count three times when a conservative was nominated. In 1964 Barry Goldwater was nominated, he was arguably conservative despite the fact that later in life he favored abortion on demand. He was basically a Kennedy Republican who favored tax cuts and opposed LBJ’s expansive welfare state. In 1980 and 1984 Ronald Reagan won the GOP nomination. Reagan was largely a conservative but let’s not kid ourselves about how conservative he actually was. As Governor of California he signed into law bills allowing abortion and no-fault divorce. He later said he regreted those decisions but not enough to stop him from nominating progressives like Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court. He also raised taxes and the Federal debt while in the White House.

Other than Goldwater and Reagan, the Republican Party has nominated one moderate progressive after another. Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Bush 41 and 43, Dole, McCain and Romney were all party progressives. If we want to pretend these nominees are RINO’s then we have to pretend like most of the Republican Party is a fraud. In reality all of these nominees are in keeping with the historic Republican Party. The GOP gave America its first progressive President in Theodore Roosevelt. It gave us a laundry list of progressive Senators and Congressmen, including the progressive La Follette dynasty in Wisconsin the elder of which ran on the Progressive Party ticket in 1924 and won 17% of the vote. There hasn’t been a Republican President who has reduced the Federal budget since Calvin Coolidge in the 20’s. Coolidge is perhaps the most conservative President of the 20th century. His replacement was Herbert Hoover, a typical progressive Republican.

No doubt that party philosophy can change over time. For most of the 19th century the Democrats were the party of small government. They looked to Thomas Jefferson rather than Alexander Hamilton for guidance in governing. By the 20th century the Democrats had shifted to the progressive outlook, having been swept away with the progressive movement which started gaining steam after the Civil War. President Woodrow Wilson represents the Democrats formal break with their historic conservative past, which in the last election or two has been finalized with the elimination of the last blue dog conservative Democrats. By the time FDR was elected, the Democrats had moved well to the left of the Republicans. That doesn’t mean the Republicans had moved to the right, only that the Democrats shifted left. The Republicans have stayed remarkably consistent, the difference between Hoover and Romney is negligible.

Conservatives have no party to flock to. The Democrats largely pushed conservatives out decades ago. The Republicans have only taken us on because it helps them retain their power. While the Republican Party is more conservative today than the Democrats, its core philosophy isn’t small government but rather a slow shift to bigger government. This is in contrast with the Democrats who want a shift to bigger government immediately. Make no mistake though, conservatives are the RINO’s. We’re the outsiders in the Republican Party, we always have been. The GOP wasn’t created as a party of small government, it was created as a Hamiltonian party of expanding Federal power and expenditures. The GOP has remained true to its core philosophy, the Bush’s, Romney’s and Christie’s of the party have made sure of that.

[ek_hornbeck]

Conservative didn’t mean the same thing in the early 19th century that it does today. Neither did liberal. An early 19th century conservative was a monarchist if he was in Europe and if he was in America he believed in that sort of system adapted to the election of a President and Congress. While obviously we did not invite a member of the Royal family to serve as our King, Hamilton and the conservatives did want to adopt that system of government.

I agree with your assessment of Hamilton, he was a conservative in the sense of supporting a system of government modeled on the British monarchy, minus the monarch. He was also a mercantilist (hence the trade protectionism and the support for federally-funded infrastructure). Mercantilists were the conservatives, classical liberals were the radicals.

However, this observation defeats the whole premise of your argument that Hamilton is the precursor to progressives, populists, and radicals. Support for tariffs and federal public works (i.e. roads and bridges) is not equivalent to support for a welfare state or for social radicalism. Otherwise, you're stuck with making the absurd claim that the British monarchy is the principal inspiration for LBJ's Great Society (and reversing the original definition of Left vs. Right Wing during the time of the French Revolution).

Apart from your (IMO confused) remarks about Hamilton and the political spectrum in the late 18th/19th century US, I agree with the main premise of your article: that conservatives are the odd men out in the Republican party today, and have been so for decades. Unfortunately, Nixon, Ford, Bush I, Bush II and nominees like Dole, McCain, Romney, etc. are the rule, not the exception.