THE RISE OF THE RINO
WAnd enemies — that is, RINOs — need to be destroyed. And not just with talk radio witticisms and effective primary election campaigns. With guns. That’s the message of Mr. Greitens’ video.
hen Sam DeMarco first got into politics as a Tea Party activist in 2009, he was a thorn in the side of the Republican establishment. Now, as a member of Allegheny County Council and chair of the Republican Committee of Allegheny County, he says he understands how elected officials felt when grassroots groups hammered them.
“I learned that you can’t just go around yelling at people,” he said. “You have to roll up your sleeves and work to make change happen.”
He joined and then ran the local conservative group Veterans and Patriots United from 2010 to 2015. And he ultimately succeeded in the goal that motivated him to get involved: moving the Republican Party to the right.
Now, though, some of his fellow Republicans think he has become what he used to ridicule — a RINO, or Republican In Name Only. Popularized by the late Rush Limbaugh, it’s now an all-purpose term of abuse on the right for any Republican whose ideology isn’t pure enough and whose methods aren’t aggressive enough.
Its use proliferated in the Trump era among those who believe cowardly or compromised party leaders let the country down by failing to overturn the 2020 election. These people, Mr. DeMarco said, “consider themselves patriots, and anyone else who isn’t in lock step is a RINO.”
And now he’s being challenged for the leadership of the county party by multiple candidates who say he’s abandoned the cause.
Mr. DeMarco’s experience is symbolic of a broader political trend: the escalation of the rhetoric of political crisis, and of friend vs. enemy.
The American notion of politics depends on the idea that all political differences are ultimately reconcilable, at least in terms of practical compromise, as long as the people submit to the rules of the democratic system. That requires that people think of their fellow citizens as at least potential friends, and never as implacable enemies.
To the twentieth century German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, this was impossibly naive. He thought that the distinction between the friend and the enemy, whose ideas and very existence are incompatible with one’s own, is the essence of politics. One side must win, and the other must be driven away.
Schmitt published this “concept of the political” at the end of the Weimar period in Germany. The regime’s Nazi successors were found the jurist’s ideas very useful.
But for Schmitt, though he did pal around with the Nazis, the friend-enemy distinction wasn’t meant to be a prescription for politics, but rather a description of how politics actually is, whether we like it or not. Now, as America’s democratic norms atrophy, we seem determined to confirm Schmitt’s concept of the political.
Last week, Republican primary frontrunner Eric Greitens released an online video designed to motivate disaffected Republican voters and — far more importantly — outrage everybody else. The candidate holds a shotgun in a suburban neighborhood alongside several men in tactical gear. He explains that he is approaching the RINO’s lair, and the men burst into a home. Then he urges the viewer to get a RINO hunting license: “There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
Until we save our country. It’s no longer temporary control of the branches of government that’s at stake in every election; it’s the very survival of the United States of America. And if that’s the case, then you’re either trying to save the country, or destroy it. One or the other. Friend or enemy.
And enemies — that is, RINOs — need to be destroyed. And not just with talk radio witticisms and effective primary election campaigns. With guns. That’s the message, not implicit but in-your-face explicit, of Mr. Greitens’ video.
It wasn’t always this way. When the epithet first became popular in the Limbaugh era, it was generally considered to be, at least in part, a humorous term; its corniness was part of the point, since its purpose was more ridicule than abuse.
But it was always a dangerous term, because its clear meaning is to establish the line between friend and enemy within the Republican Party. A “Republican in name only” is, by definition, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a fifth column, a traitor whose actions and existence threaten the integrity of the party. It can be, and was often, said with a wink. But once enough people took its clear meaning deadly seriously, it became deadly serious.
After the 2020 election, Sam DeMarco went as far as he felt he could within the law and his own conscience to support his party’s candidate. He became one of Donald Trump’s shadow electors, but he never claimed to be a legitimate elector, only that he would be one if a court threw Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to the incumbent. And so he received death threats because he didn’t go far enough.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Speaker of the House Bryan Cutler signed a letter asking the state’s Congressional delegation to object to certification of Pennsylvania’s vote. But he, too, didn’t go far enough. He had people yelling outside his Lancaster County home while his teenage son was there alone, and had to disconnect his home phone due to the abusive calls.
These are not liberal Republicans. They entered politics to make the GOP more conservative, and they succeeded.
But now the Republican right thinks they’re RINOs. They’re enemies. They must be driven out.