I am afraid that we are condemned by universal usage to call the Republicans the red party and the Democrats the blue party even though any reasonable approach would be to reverse the colors. Similarly, I am afraid the term, "Rino" has entered the lexicon in a way that does not necessarily comport with history.
Incidentally, I have been railing about the misuse of the word to "Swiftboat" when the media should be saying to, "Bork." I do not think I will win the fight either.
Finally, one can apply many criticisms of statism to Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, if one wanted to look into the historical origins of the party deeply enough. One might also make serious criticisms of the radical Republicans and reconstruction from a classical conservative perspective. The first progressive president, I suppose, was Teddy Roosevelt.
So I suppose one could say that the idea of a "Rino" comes about only in the modern conservative movement beginning with Bill Buckley and Kirk. But I take your point.
All the best,
The problem is that all of things we still rail against were begun by Republicans. Put simply one can not save the Union by destroyng the Constitution.
Wouldn’t Nullification & Secession have been nice weapons to use in fight on Roe or Obamacare, for example?
I would simply urge you to read Judge Abel Upshur’s Commentariess on the Constition in response to Justice Joseph Story’s view to see the fallacies of your response.
The question ultimately is: If the Republican
Party was actually the Party of small Government how did we end up $140 Trillion in debt? While only talking about $16 Trillion of it? And of that 25% is Government spending which is overhead to the taxpayer.
Perhaps, I should mention another avenue for your exploration and that is Charles A. Dana (Brook Farm) who was Marx & Engel’s editor at Greeley’s NY Daily Tribune for 9 years prior to the War he went on to become one Stanton’s of Stanton’s chielf staff members ..... Try reading Marx & Engels on the American Civil War. You might be surpised to see the link between the Union Army and militant Germans from the failed Socialist’s revolutions of 1848. Names like Weydemeyer, Sigel and Schurz.
It doesn’t seem to me that one can fix anything with out knowing exactly how it was broken in the first place...
To this end, I don’t think Buckley and others were helpful.
T.R. was representative not the exception.
Best,
Shubel