Republican In Name Only


Republican In Name Only is a pejorative term used by conservative members of the United States Republican Party to describe and target Republicans whose political views or actions they consider insufficiently conservative, predominantly moderate and liberal Republicans. The acronym emerged in the 1990s.

Origins

In 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt, then-President William Howard Taft, and Senator Robert M. La Follette fought for ideological control of the Republican Party and each denounced the other two as "not really Republican." The phrase Republican in name only emerged as a popular political pejorative in the 1920s, 1950s, and 1980s.
The earliest known print appearance of the term RINO was in the Manchester, New Hampshire newspaper then called The Union Leader.
Buttons featuring the red slash through an image of a rhinoceros were spotted in the New Hampshire State House as early as 1992. In 1993, future California Republican Assembly President Celeste Greig distributed buttons featuring a red slash over the word RINO to express opposition to Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan. The term came into widespread usage during subsequent election cycles.

Usage

During Republican primary campaign season, some conservative organizations target RINO Republicans who fail to adopt their stances. National Federation of Republican Assemblies started the "RINO Hunters' Club", whom they believe to be too moderate on such issues as taxes, gun rights, and abortion. The fiscally conservative 5014 organization Club for Growth invented the "RINO Watch" list to monitor "Republican office holders around the nation who have advanced egregious anti-growth, anti-freedom or anti-free market policies"; other conservative groups published similar lists.
More recently, the term has been used to describe Republican critics of President Donald Trump, regardless of ideology.

Similar terms

While the term RINO is of recent coinage, the concept of being an inauthentic member of the Republican Party by not representing its more conservative faction is a recurring theme in Party history.

Me-too Republicans

In the 1930s and 1940s, Me-too Republicans described those running on a platform of agreeing with the Democratic Party, proclaiming only minor or moderating philosophical differences. An example is two-time presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, who ran against the popular Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successor Harry Truman. Dewey did not oppose Roosevelt's New Deal programs altogether, but merely campaigned on the promise that Republicans would run them more efficiently and less corruptly.
From 1936 to 1976, the more centrist members of the Republican Party frequently won the national nomination with candidates such as Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, Thomas E. Dewey, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The mainstream of the Republican Party was generally supportive of the New Deal. In the 1950s, conservatives such as Robert A. Taft and Barry Goldwater, who rallied against "me-too Republicans", were considered outside of the mainstream of the then-centrist GOP; serious consideration was given to leaving the GOP and forming a new conservative party in coalition with the "states' rights" Democrats of the South.

Nixonians and Rockefeller Republicans

In the 1960s and 1970s, Republicans considered liberal on domestic policy but hawkish on foreign policy were sometimes called "Nixonian", or "Rockefeller Republicans". While the term Nixonian took on other meanings after the Watergate scandal, neither expression had always been considered pejorative.

Gypsy moth Republican

In the 1980s, the term gypsy moth Republican described Republicans from the Northeast and Midwest who voted against the Ronald Reagan administration's proposed cuts in aid to economically distressed people, contrasting with boll weevil Democrats, who voted for these cuts. The gypsy moth is an invasive species destructive to trees in the Northeastern United States.

Cuckservative

In 2015 the term cuckservative, a portmanteau of cuckold and conservative, was popularized on the online forum 4chan, and embraced by both internet trolls and the nativist alt-right. The metaphorical "" is represented in a genre of interracial pornography as a masochistic white husband who allows his wife to have sex with a stronger black man, thereby participating in his own symbolic emasculation. In white supremacist vernacular the term is an accusation of yielding to non-white interests on issues such as immigration or modern display of the Confederate flag; however, the term gained use by more mainstream conservatives to denounce Republicans whose compromises included vote trading, rhetorical restraint in deference to donors, cooperation with Democrats on any particular initiative, or attempting to court voters by making appeals to supposedly liberal ideals.