NeoCon Blonde is sick of the term RINO and I can understand the point. However I think the problem (as is with most words) is overuse. The tendency to call anyone who's allegedly less "conservative" than you consider yourself a RINO is insane and stupid. That said, I think there's a valid use of the term RINO. Moderate and RINO are not synonymous. But RINO and statist Republican are.
(Yeah, it's that trip again.)
Statism is the one thing that goes against Republican/conservative ideals no matter which way you try to spin it. It corrodes the very nature of the Republican party and those in our ranks who espouse it are in point of fact Republican in Name Only. Using the government to try to build a "better world" instead of letting free individuals do it, is completely at odds with the central idea of the Republican party. I don't care if your "better world" is a world of gods or men, if its foundation is the government and its guns instead of free people you're not a Republican. I don't care what you call yourself. There are a lot of ideas that can be open to debate in the Republican party, but statism isn't one of them.
This ended up being more confrontational than I expected, but maybe it should be. The stakes are high. They're always high.
4 comments:
100% correct. The issue of statism is the primary reason I don't identify myself as a Republican. I am a Constitutionalist conservative. The Republicans who want to inject religion into law to shape social policy are no different than the libs who want to use taxes to shape social policy. Until those in power realize it is not a legitimate function of government to influence social policy except to protect individual rights, all statist of any party will be at odds with freedom and liberty.
The problem is that people no longer believe or understand that government's role is to protect the rights of its people, not to build utopias. So people elect leaders who promise to build them a utopia instead of leaders who promise to leave them alone.
The absurdity is almost more than I can stand because utopia isn't even a feasible goal. Hell, even Star Trek and its (awesomely) relentless idealism never gave the audience a real utopia. The greatest atrocities in human history were the results of people trying to build utopias.
It's like Doctor Who. Everyone climbs into the rocket headed for Utopia because they heard a pretty story about a place where the sky's made of diamonds when there were kids. When they get there it's just the human race cannibalizing itself and it's advances until there's nothing recognizably human left.
My personal opinion is that any sane Republican woman qualifies as a RINO. The distaste for anything that might resemble moderation in our party might be the reason why the majority of women are voting blue. If Republicans were smart, they would be doing everything within their power to make our party the party of women.
That's a good point, but I think that the biggest factor in increasing female membership in the party is party image. The GOP has essentially ceded control of its image to the Democrats. The Democrats have done a spectacular job of painting us a band of racist misogynist theocrats who are either fat cat billionaires or inbred navel gazing hicks. Any member who can be tagged as a minority is either a brainwashed dupe or a sellout.
This party is much more of a coalition than the Democrats and so we have to find a way to work with each other. (Except for the statists, but I've already covered that.)
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