BY MICKEY EDWARDS

It has become common in recent years for self-described Republican “conservatives” to target for defeat in party primaries those candidates (including incumbent officeholders) whom they consider Republicans In Name Only (“RINOs).

This purification process is based on the rational view that if one believes in party-based governance, Republican voters should elect those candidates who most accurately reflect what the party stands for. It’s a view that confuses America’s constituent-based governing system with the parliamentary systems the Founders rejected (for good reason) but I’m willing to accept the anti-RINO logic even if based on a faulty premise.

Let me join, therefore, in suggesting that the Republican Party would be best served by reducing the number of RINOs in its ranks. I’ll go a step farther and state that the current problem the party faces (amazingly low levels of public support) is precisely because of the number of RINOs who represent the party in Congress and state legislatures.

So who, exactly, are these RINOs who have driven the party to the brink of extinction as a viable political force? To answer that, we have to accept the definition from which the purists themselves proceed. That is, a Republican In Name Only is one who  represents neither traditional Republican views nor the views of the Republican electorate.

First, do those who have declared themselves to be the “true” conservatives actually represent the views that modern Republican Party – and modern “conservatives”– have traditionally espoused?

In 2008, after I published “Reclaiming Conservatism,” a look at how conservative principles had been undermined by a new breed of activists who claimed the title but whose views were a radical departure from conservative norms, I gave a talk at the Heritage Foundation. I had been one of the three founding trustees of the foundation, in 1973, but find myself puzzled by much of what it had begun to espouse. In preparing to introduce me, a foundation official gave members of the audience an overview of the organization by reading from its mission statement.

One of the Foundation’s goals, it seemed, was to come to the defense of “traditional” social values. That involvement in questions of how individuals should live their lives would have gagged the founders of the modern conservative movement. And, as I pointed out, that ambition had not been part of the original mission statement but added more than two decades later by people who had apparently been drinking of the “government knows best” waters that had been anathema to earlier conservatives.

Barry Goldwater, the father of the modern conservative movement, called homophobia “just plain dumb”; Goldwater-era conservatives supported environmental protection and federal funding for family planning, supported the Equal Rights Amendment, supported full voting rights in Congress for citizens of the District of Columbia.

It was a movement that supported individual freedom, not government as “nanny” (that had always been the province of the other team). Ronald Reagan, in his 1980 inaugural speech, said “it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work” (so much for the modern “conservative’s” willingness to shut down government). “Government can and must provide opportunity,” Reagan said (so much for the idea that government has no role to play in economic life). Even with large deficits and big budgets, conservatives believed in prudence; even Reagan agreed to tax increases when circumstances demanded them.

It’s not just that today’s self-proclaimed “conservatives” are themselves a departure from real conservatism. Republicans in Congress don’t even represent the Republican Party.

A Marist-McClatchey Poll in 2012 found that Republican voters overwhelmingly opposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid spending, opposed ending the home mortgage deduction, opposed the elimination of charitable deductions, opposed raising the age of Medicare eligibility.

Harper Polling, in 2012, found fewer than half of Republicans surveyed believed their representatives should never violate the so-called Norquist pledge not to raise taxes. More tellingly, a Rasmussen poll in January of this year found that only 30 percent of likely Republican voters believe that the Republicans in Congress represent the party’s values; 63 percent said congressional Republicans have lost touch with the party’s base.

Republicans do indeed have a problem. It’s a “RINO” problem. The people who represent the Republican Party in Congress, who dominate party primaries and talk radio, who dismiss the party’s commitment to a free people making free choices, who see government as disposable, are the RINOs, it is they who are the Republicans in Name Only.

Editor’s Note: Mickey Edwards was a member of Congress from Oklahoma for 16 years and a member of the House Republican leadership. He has taught at Harvard and Princeton and is a vice president of the Aspen Institute. His most recent book is “Reclaiming Conservatism.”