A Brief History of RINO'S and DINO'S And Why The Way Each Side Uses The Term Reflects How They Approach Politics

 

 

So much of the time when I tried to criticize some of the more extreme views on this site, I was accused of being a MAGA. When I explained I was a registered Democrat and had been one since I was old enough to vote, the insults almost always switched to something that those involved actually  considered worse: DINO or Democrat in Name Only.

This term has only started to come into common slang in the last few years. It's political equivalent on the other side of the aisle – Republican in Name Only or RINO – has been around slightly longer and has been used more professional, usually by Trump ever since he entered politics. Like so much else in American discourse the only new thing about either of these terms is the acronym: variations on either have been going around for decades with new words coming into existence with each new generation. But they're both saying the same thing and it's about who says them rather than their targets.

Basically it's a version of: I, who have been a member of this political party for basically ten minutes now, am more qualified to know what all people in this party have always wanted far more than elected officials who have been there for years if not decades. Because they have either been corrupted by 'the system' or have failed litmus tests we just created, these elected officials are a disgrace to the party and must be removed to make room for others who share my way of thinking.

These ideological shifts are not new in politics and basically came to their earliest form in both political parties, unsurprisingly, during the 1960s. In both political parties, it always refers to the newest and most extreme members who've grown dissatisfied with the Old Guard's complacency. But there's a huge difference between how each generation chose to deal with it and it's worth talking about it because it's another in the endless line of illustrations of why the extremists in both parties are just mirror images of each other, one has been endlessly more effective in turning their vision into reality.

The modern conservative vision was founding during the campaign for Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater's movement was launched by the so-called Young Republicans who had become despairing of the dominance of the so-called Eastern Establishment of the Party, at that time represented by Nelson Rockefeller. The divide had been simmering since before World War II but ever since 1940 the Eastern Establishment had managed to thrust their more moderate wing of the party as their Presidential Candidates over those in the Midwest. Sick of this during the leadup to the 1964 campaign the Young Republicans worked to put Goldwater as their nominee even before he agreed to run for President.

The result was a victory for the conservatives and an electoral disaster. Goldwater came across as dangerous before the primaries were even over and he would lose in what was the biggest landslide in the popular vote with LBJ taking 61 percent of the vote to Goldwater's 37 percent.  With Goldwater defeated the Old Guard swept back in.

But when Watergate happened the conservative wing waged another battle, this time with Ronald Reagan as their standard bearer. In 1980 he would win the Republican nomination for President and then in an electoral landslide over Carter followed by a 49 state reelection over Mondale four years later. After Reagan's win nearly every ten years a new wave of Conservatism would take root in the Republican Party – Gingrich's Contract with America in 1994, the Tea Party in 2010 – and in each case gain huge majorities in the House and in the former case, control of the Senate for the next twelve years. Each time the shifting of the borders of what a Republican won was buttressed by the fact that it had gained immense political power for the GOP.

In that sense Trump's 2016 campaign and MAGA was just the most recent variation on it. In fact Trump's campaign slogan 'Make America Great Again', so derided by the left as bigotry, was simply part of Reagan's acceptance speech before the Republican convention in 1980 and had been used by both parties ever since. (Clinton had used it during his 1992 campaign for President.) Historians would eventually unearth that fact but the left, rather then conclude that all Trump was doing was campaigning, chose instead to make it all about how Trump didn't have an original bone in his body.

The reason that Trump and his predecessors were able to use terms like RINO  - previous derivative terms had included 'Me Too" for Republicans like Dewey and Eisenhower who accepted the New Deal as written law – is because it was done with the idea of gaining political power. Everything the GOP does when it comes to pushing the Overton Window on what it means to be a Republican and what one isn't is done with the sole purpose of winning elections and consolidating their political power in either Congress or the White House. This has been, for the record, enormously effective considering their track record since Goldwater's electoral disaster. They would win five of the next six Presidential elections in the 20^th century and then went on to win the next two in the 21^st. It gave them control of both Houses of Congress from 1994-2006 and they've controlled the House for eighteen of the first 26 years of this century and the Senate for twelve.  People may be repulsed by how they do it – I myself have my issues with it - but if you simply view it as a means to political power, you can't deny its been effective.

Though that, of course, is exactly what the far left has been trying do for my entire lifetime.

Just to be clear when it comes to election denialism everyone associated with 2020 has nothing on the far left. I'm not talking about 2016 or even 2000. I mean that they've spent a huge amount of the time and energy trying to deny the entire conservative revolution.

They've denounced the Southern strategy as racist which is immoral and therefore that Republicans use it makes their wins illegitimate. They've torn apart everything Nixon did in 1968 and 1972 while denying any role they had in either election (oh, we'll get to that). They'll do everything to say Reagan manipulated the hostage crisis to keep Carter from winning and Bush Senior was lying about his involve in Contra-Gate. They'll say how the Fairness Doctrine created talk radio and Fox News which has, of course, been brainwashing the electorate for thirty years. They'll accuse Republicans of every conceivable crime and immorality. None of this can disguise the fact that they've spent more time and energy in the last half-century 'proving' the immorality of Republicans rather than doing anything to try and similarly take over the Democratic Party.

The 'highpoint' of the left's takeover of the party – the one they will always sing about – is when they marched in the streets and took over college campuses and completely righteous actions in Chicago. And they did have political power: they managed the insurgency campaign of Eugene McCarthy, which forced LBJ to not run for reelection in 1968 and they helped McGovern win the Democratic nomination in 1972. The fact that in the former they all but guaranteed Nixon's election and that the McGovern campaign was an exercise in political ineptitude has always been negated in their minds by Watergate. They believed then  that because they were on 'the right side of history' America should follow their path. They've never gotten over the fact that after losing 49 of fifty states the Democratic Party decided they wanted to win elections.

So ever since then they've essentially thrown shade on the few major Democratic victories that have happened because of that. Carter was regarded as a failure by the liberal wing at the time, was challenged by Ted Kennedy in the primary, and was regarded to political obscurity among Democrats for the remainder of the 20^th century. By the time Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s were winning political office – Clinton being the most successful – the left had adopted the argument of 'no difference between the two parties' and called them all 'neoliberals'. This was these leftists saying to the Democrats: "How dare you abandon the principles of the party just because the electorate had chosen to reject them?"

That's the biggest different between the far left and the far right: the far right hates the Democrats because they are imposing a radical socialist agenda on America when they have power and the far left hates them because they're not doing that. The far left thinks the Republicans all monsters but that's never made them loyal to Democrats. In their minds a Democratic candidate if he campaigns to the left must when he achieves office govern further to the left. Every election of a Democrat to the White House is a mandate for the progressive agenda whether he campaigned on it or not. The voters themselves can't be trusted to know what's best for them. Half of them vote for Republicans, after all. How smart can they be?

Most of the left's sniping was purely at an academic level ever since 1972. Then Bernie Sanders – who isn't even a Democrat in Name Only – ran in the 2016 primaries on a platform that for all its 21^st century terminology was reheated McGovernism. Sanders lost the primary to Hilary Clinton – and yet somehow everyone in the left immediately made the assumption that the failed campaign was the gold standard for every Democratic official going forward.

One of the ironies the Justice Democrats arguing that everyone who isn't them is a DINO is that many of them aren't Democrats themselves but Democratic Socialists who are running as Democrats. The relative few who have won office have been very open about their membership in the Democratic Socialist party which barely fits on the borders of the Justice Democrats platform. And unlike the Tea Party, their movement has not in five elections been able to take a majority in either house of Congress, something the movement's founders have admitted but the membership has ignored.

The few that are here and the activists among them will call every Democrat who isn't Bernie or AOC a DINO. Which is insane. Bernie isn't a Democrat; AOC and the Squad have been in the House for eight years and none of them have ever managed to defeat a single Republican who holds elected office in Congress, let alone at a state level.  If anything I'd argue the burden is on them to prove they're not DINOs. And part of being a Democrat is not just not being a Republican. It's being a good public servant. In that I find no difference between the behavior of Lauren Boebert or Paulina Luna one the right or AOC and Rashida Taib on the left.  They have many interests, some good, some bad, but none of them have to do with best serving the institutions they've run for and are elected too.

At this point  I think one of the biggest differences between a member of the Freedom Caucus and a Justice Democrat candidate is that the Republicans  usually has the common sense to wait until after they're elected to make it clear they won't compromise with anyone, not even the leaders of  their own party. The Cori Bushes and Ilhan Ohmar's of the world basically make it part of their campaign speeches. They can say Republicans believe in power and don't have any principles and I'd be willing to grant the truth of that with many in my lifetime. The problem is it's been very clear that the left means that they think principles are far more important then having political power – and they genuinely can't comprehend why the Democrats have refused to embrace that as a campaign strategy. It's also why, not at all coincidentally, they don't have the kind of  political power that the  extreme right  has managed in the Republican Party.

 

Now I agree the left should have a voice in the Democratic Party. There is a demand for it and I agree with many of  their principles. But there's a difference between a voice and speaking for their entire party. And that I'd argue is the major difference between who uses the terms RINO and DINO.

Because here's the thing. When Trump calls someone a RINO he's just using the standard that every insurgent movement from the Goldwaterites to the Tea Party did. Once you have the numbers and the power you have the freedom to make being a Republican any definition you want. AOC and Bernie and their followers don't have either the numbers or power behind their movement: all they have is the same moral self-righteousness they've always had. But having the moral high ground doesn't mean you get to define what an institution's positions are: you have to have some kind of power to back it up. Until that wing of the party had that and not before, as far as any Democrat is concerned 'the Squad' are the DINO's, not the other way around.

And for those who want to call me names or will: speaking as someone who is a registered Democrat and has voted for them almost every election up and down the ballot (which ones I haven't are none of your business) who has been studying American politics since he was a teenager and probably read more book about American History before he was 18 then today's activist has read in their entire lifetime, as someone who knows the long and complicated history of the Democratic party as well as America, and who keeps informed about every aspects of politics by reading journals and publications as well as online articles, I think I'm more qualified to talk about what it means to be a Democrat then someone who follows AOC on Social media and therefore thinks they know everything about every aspect of American life and certainly what it means to be a Democrat. That may be a minority opinion, but hey I'm a Democrat. That's usually the only kind we've been able to have in my lifetime.