The WHINOs and the RINOs Should Be Friends

The WHINOs and the RINOs Should Be Friends

Christopher Chantrill

Last week the Ace of Spades guy declared a plague on both their houses where the Republican Party is concerned. He sees a class war going on in the Republican Party between the Working/Middle Class house and the Professional (or Comfortable) Class. Ace writes:

Both classes, frankly, disgust me, depending on the day of the week.

It shouldn't be necessary to remind Ace that a political party is a group of humans whose hatred for each other is only exceeded by their hatred for the Other party.

A lot of Comfortable Class pundits – like Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson – have been wagging their fingers lately at the Working/Middle Class folks for getting riled up by Donald Trump. Jonah tells usthat "anger is not an argument," and Kevin tells us that we are WHINOs. Either way, Trump will betray us and disappoint us, they say.

Well of course he will. That's what all politicians do, sooner or later, and usually sooner rather than later. That's what "put not your trust in princes" was all about.

So let's get over all this teenage-girl hyperventilation and remember what we are all here for.

After the fundamental transformation of Barack Obama we are all agreed, surely, on the need to move the needle towards smaller, more limited government and a return to the rule of law.

It's easy to see why everyone on the right is upset and pointing the finger at the other guys. It comes down to this: we really did not see this coming, that the liberals in the Democratic Party would shovel ObamaCare down our throats in a partisan cram down. That the lessons of the Reagan era would be thrown in the toilet. That liberals would rally around an unreconstructed Progressivism, based in a pompous faith in the educated ruling class, and would proceed as though we hadn't learned anything from the failures of big government from the 1970s, the fall of communism, the stupidities of the entitlement and regulatory state.

Let's face it: liberals saw their opportunity and they took it, throwing the careful triangulations of the Bill Clinton era in the trashcan.

So the Professional Class RINOs think that the way to proceed is by triangulating towards blacks, Hispanics, and gays while the Working/Middle Class WHINOs want to triangulate towards pro-life, traditional marriage, and white working-class men.

Let's all rehearse the spirit of Oklahoma. The WHINO and the RINO, the farmer and the cowman, should be friends, so they can join together to deal with the menace of Jud Fry down in his root cellar.

Our Jud Fry is the whole universe of lefty activism that believes in the rancid idea that what America needs is a more government coercion. It's a song that's as old as the hills.

It's the song of the slave-owner, who thought of the humans on his plantation "as a piece of machinery... all its parts should be uniform and exact, and its impelling force regular and steady." Or the Southern planters during Reconstruction that thought that "the true station of the Negro is that of a servant." Or the New Dealers that thought that workers couldn't save for retirement unless the government did it for them. Or the Great Society liberals that thought that seniors couldn't save for end-of-life care without the government. Or the Senator Warren that thinks that consumers can't deal with mortgage finance without a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to drown the mortgage industry in bureaucratic red tape.

I understand the frustration of the WHINOs. All we want to do is live our lives as responsible citizens, making a living and raising a family. The last thing we need is Obama and his army of SJW haters telling us that we are the haters.

I understand the caution of the RINOs. They know more than us amateurs just how badly the government and the culture is stacked against conservatives and Republicans, and how quickly a promising political career can be sent to Outer Slobbovia.

But maybe the reckless Donald Trump has taught us something about courage and boldness.

We'll need it because in 2016 Republicans don't just need to win, they need to win a mandate.

They need a mandate from the women who take ObamaCare's failures personally to replace ObamaCare with reforms that help women care for their loved ones without the headwind of spiraling premiums and deductibles and bureaucrats.

They need a mandate from seniors to apply some sensible fixes to Medicare. They need to put the billionaire warmists on the defensive over their green energy boondoggles. They need to win a victory in the war against the suburbs. And lots, lots more.

They need about half a dozen Democratic senators to feel really vulnerable in 2017-18.

But first, the WHINOs and the RINOs must be friends.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrillruns the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.