Republicans in Name Only

The splintering of the GOP accelerates

I really don’t like the term RINO. I believe it is used too often as a pejorative, as racist is on the left, to describe anyone with whom the speaker has a disagreement. As often as I have disagreed with Governor Brad Little, for example, I do not consider him a RINO. Many of his positions, even the ones I don’t support, grow out of longtime Republican principles that would not have been unfamiliar to Republicans over the past fifty years.

When longtime Republicans endorse Democratic candidates, however, I will use the term RINO.

It started when former Attorney General and State Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones joined Democratic AG candidate Tom Arkoosh’s campaign team, just weeks after publicly urging Democratic voters to register as Republicans to affect the May primary.

Then Senator Fred Martin, defeated in that same primary by Representative Codi Galloway, endorsed her opponent Rick Just; the same Rick Just that Martin himself had beaten in 2020.

Developer Tommy Ahlquist, who campaigned as a conservative in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, donated the maximum to far-left Boise Mayor Lauren McLean.

Finally, some fifty Republicans, including outgoing Senator Patti Ann Lodge and former First Lady Lori Otter, signed on to support Tom Arkoosh last week.

These turncoat RINOs say that they are trying to protect Idaho and the Republican Party from extremism. Of course, when they say extremism we know they mean traditional conservative values. At a deeper level, however, we are seeing the next phase of a great realignment of the parties.

Politics is never static. Issues come and go, and parties are formed when people coalesce into groups that advance their interests. The Republican Party formed in 1854 primarily to oppose the expansion of slavery into the territories. At the time they would have been considered the more progressive party, since they wanted to change the status quo. The Republicans were again considered progressive at the turn of the 20th century when Teddy Roosevelt used the power of government to break big business monopolies.

The Republican Party of the 1940s and 50s came out of the New Deal incredibly weakened - in 1937 the US Senate consisted of 76 Democrats to only 16 Republicans. They had to adjust to the postwar debates over how to confront Soviet communism, how to manage the new federal bureaucracy birthed by the New Deal, and how to handle issues such as civil rights. The more conservative and isolationist wing of the party was led by Senator Bob Taft, son of the former president, while the more liberal and expansionist wing was led by New York Governor Thomas Dewey.

Dewey did not, in fact, defeat Truman

The most successful Republicans were able to balance the two competing visions: Both sides were able to support war hero Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s and Richard Nixon skillfully weaved his way between the Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller camps in the 1960s. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and George Bush formed a fruitful alliance between the two sides.

Two concurrent realignments occurred in the 1970s and 80s that still define the Republican Party today. The children of conservative southern Democrats, growing up in a world without the racial segregation and class structure that had long defined their culture, found that the Democratic Party no longer represented their interests and they joined the Republicans. They do not necessarily want to return to the Jim Crow days, but there are many stories of families with grandparents who continued to vote straight-ticket Democrat out of habit and loyalty while their grandchildren became staunch Republicans.

At the same time, the children of first and second generation immigrants from Europe who came to America fleeing communism also found a home in the Republican Party. Rather than being entirely opposed to socialism, many were supporters of Leon Trotsky, believing that Joseph Stalin had corrupted Marx’s vision. These new conservatives made common cause with the religious right and former southern Democrats in their fight against global communism, which was won during the Reagan/Bush era. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 the neoconservatives tried to move the GOP away from social issues to focus on purely economic ones.

Capitalism was once held up as the alternative to godless communism, but over the last thirty years it has become a god unto itself. The danger of focusing entirely on the economy and foreign affairs is that it becomes easy to take the American people for granted. Once you abandon the moral framework of Christianity that this country was founded upon, how can you make a moral argument against outsourcing thousands of jobs from Detroit to China? Patrick Buchanan warned us not to forget the American people in his famous Culture War speech in 1992, but Republican leadership ignored his advice.

Notice how most of the so-called Republicans who came out to support Tom Arkoosh are just plain old. Many of them are retired career politicians. Their political mindsets were formed decades ago, when the battle lines looked much different. The neoconservative agenda of defining conservatism as “low taxes, free trade, America as world police, and economic growth with no concern for social issues” is obsolete. We should be thankful that these geriatric Republicans are publicly taking the mask off, because it confirms the suspicion of many that their strongest values are on the left, not the right.

The modern Democratic Party is a fusion of the worst aspects of the old left and the old right. From yesterday’s progressives they get an obsession with race, ethnicity, and gender - of demonizing white men - and a desire to tear down every structure in our society, from the nuclear family to the Constitution. From yesterday’s neoconservatives they get a disdain for the working man, worship of corporate America, and no limit to their foreign adventures. The Republican Party is increasingly the party of a socially conservative working class that has no desire to be replaced by foreign migrants nor for their children to be indoctrinated in woke ideology, sent to die in foreign wars, and murdered by cheap drugs like fentanyl.

If you went back in time and told people that in 2022 the Republicans would be antiwar and skeptical of Big Pharma, while the Democrats demanded foreign intervention and slavishly obeyed vaccine and mask mandates, you would have been laughed out of the room. That is the nature of political realignments.

The union of globalist neoconservatives and social conservatives that has defined the Republican Party for half a century reached a breaking point with the candidacy of Donald Trump. Many neoconservatives dropped the mask, opposing not only Trump but the millions of social conservatives who supported him. Where they had once paid lip service to social issues like abortion, gay marriage, and fighting affirmative action, it turns out they were simply trifles they indulged in to keep social conservatives in line. Today, the NeverTrumpers run groups like the Lincoln Project, the Bulwark, and the Dispatch, whose only purpose is to defeat Republican candidates, no matter how extreme their Democratic opponents. Jonah Goldberg once wrote a book about how Hillary Clinton embodied liberal fascism, but he had no problem supporting her when the Republican candidate promised to fight for the American people.

So it is with the Idaho RINOs:

Fred Martin spent years campaigning as a pro-life and pro-2nd Amendment conservative only to turn around and endorse an abortion-supporting, gun-control advocating Democrat the moment he lost a primary.

Tommy Ahlquist likely prevented Raúl Labrador from becoming our governor in 2018 by claiming to be the true conservative in that race, but he showed his true colors with his donations and rhetoric since then.

Many conservative Republicans, myself included, have felt pressure to endorse independent candidates such as Ammon Bundy, but with a few notable exceptions we have refused to do so. We believe in the Republican Party as an organization, and while we appreciate the right of every citizen to vote his or her conscience, we have no desire to tear the party apart because we disagree with some of the candidates. If I, as a Republican PC, publicly endorsed Bundy, then I would be signaling to my fellow Republicans that I cannot be trusted. If only Arkoosh’s gang of RINOs had gotten that memo. They think the party exists to serve their whims.

Outgoing Senator Patti Ann Lodge throws away her last shred of credibility

I assume that every “Republican” who signed their names to support Tom Arkoosh last week would have lectured conservatives about party unity prior to the May primary, but it seems that unity only goes one way. Establishment figures like Patti Ann Lodge have gotten used to being part of the old boys club for so long that the moment a conservative fighter like Raúl Labrador won a single primary they went running to the Democratic Party, jettisoning every principle they once claimed to hold.

Tom Arkoosh is an unprincipled political opportunist whose only purpose is to save the good old boys network in Idaho government that Raúl Labrador threatens to dismantle. Arkoosh registered as a Republican to vote against Labrador in the May primary, and then switched to Democrat so he could run against him in the general. Arkoosh has promised to not do his job as AG; he would refuse to defend laws passed by our legislature that he personally disagrees with. Supporting him is not bipartisan, it is pure will to power.

These supposed Republicans are telling the people of Idaho that they are fine with outright socialism, with abortion on demand, with public schools grooming their students, with no transparency or accountability for taxpayer dollars. This is what Lori Otter, Patti Ann Lodge, Jim Jones, Fred Martin, Gary Raney, and Ben Ysursa support. Just as the Republican establishment of 2016 was deathly afraid of Donald Trump’s nationalism, so to do these career politicians fear Raúl Labrador’s plan to put the citizens of Idaho ahead of lobbies and other special interests.

These endorsements call into question everything these politicians did before. Now that we know that Fred Martin and Patti Ann Lodge are neither principled conservatives nor loyal Republicans, what do we make of their actions in the last legislative session when they blocked health freedom bills? Now that we know that Tommy Ahlquist supports left-wing extremists like Lauren McLean, then what can we determine about his motivation for staying in the 2018 gubernatorial primary?

How many more masks will drop in the coming years? What other political leaders who claim to be conservatives are really wolves in sheep’s clothing?

We are fighting the same battle for the soul of our country and of our party that was fought between Bob Taft and Thomas Dewey, Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, and Ronald Reagan and George Bush. We are watching a great realignment before our eyes, as the Republican Party becomes the party of the American people while the Democrats are the party of big banks, big pharma, international corporations, and dozens of identity groups who are defined not by what they can offer their country, but by what America allegedly owes them.

The Idaho Republican Party should say “good riddance” to these shameless hacks who spent their entire careers lying to their constituents about their supposed principles. Good news, they did!