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“Dyed in the wool” is a phrase referring to people who hold very strong opinions and are unwilling to change them. Synonyms include “uncompromising” and “inveterate.” In politics, people might be can be referred to as “dyed in the wool Democrats” or “dyed in the wool Republicans.”

Merriam Webster notes that the phrase was first used in its modern sense in 1580. Merriam Webster says that in the 16th century, writers began to use the expression to discuss ways that “children could, if taught early, be influenced in ways that would adhere throughout their lives.” The phrase was used in its political sense as early as the beginning of the 19th century, when Daniel Webster complained about a certain type of Democrat whose views were “as unyielding as the dye in unspun wool.”

In its literal sense, “dyed in the wool” means that the wool has been dyed before it is spun into thread. This produces a strong and long-lasting color. Metaphorically, dyed in the wool means that someone’s opinions were formed and set at an early stage in their development and that they can’t be washed away.

In 1870 Frederick Douglass delivered a speech to new voters, urging them to vote their conscience; he described himself as a “Republican dyed in the wool” but told his audience that they had an absolute right to vote as they saw fit:

I hear some men say that if the black man, in this enlightened age, should vote the Democratic ticket let him be denounced. Gentlemen I do not share that opinion at all. 1 am a Republican – a Black Republican  dyed in the wool- and I never intend to belong to any other than the party of freedom and progress. But if one of my colored fellow-citizens chooses to think that his interests and rights and the interests of the country can be better sub-served by giving his vote against the Republican party, I, as an American citizen, and as one desirous to learn the first principles of free government, affirm his right-his undoubted right-to vote as he chooses.

Dyed in the wool can be used in either a positive or a negative sense, depending on who is speaking. For example, when President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, some leftists complained that Sotomayor was not a reliable, or dyed in the wool, liberal herself. Sotomayor did not have a strong liberal record on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and the death penalty. “The fact that she hasn’t gone off on these sorts of questions I think shows that honestly she’s not a dyed in the wool liberal,” Thomas Goldstein, a leading appellate attorney, told Politico, adding, “There are places where Sotomayor will be more conservative than Souter.”

In contrast, in 2018 the chair of the Pennsylvania GOP asserted that Conor Lamb, who was then running for Congress, was a “dyed in the wool liberal” and a staunch supporter of Nancy Pelosi. The implication was that Lamb was trying to portray himself as more centrist than he actually was, and that his true colors would show through after election.

“Don’t change horses” is a phrase used to urge voters to stick with the incumbent president during times of turmoil and conflict. The full expression is “don’t change horses mid-stream” (or, sometimes, “don’t swap horses midstream”).

The expression is usually credited to Abraham Lincoln who, during the Civil War, said that voters should re-elect him because it would be foolish to change leaders in the middle of such a turbulent time. After his nomination to run for a second term, Lincoln told a group of his supporters,

“I do not allow myself to suppose that either the convention or the League have concluded to decide that I am either the greatest or best man in America, but rather they have concluded that it is not best to swap horses while crossing the river, and have further concluded that I am not so poor a horse that they might not make a botch of it in trying to swap.” 

Lincoln’s phrase spread quickly. Harper’s Weekly ran a political cartoon which showed “Old Abe” as a steady-looking, bearded horse with a voter sitting in the saddle. Lincoln’s opponent, George McClellan, was back in the bushes, surrounded with promises of peace and compromise.

In modern times, the message of sticking with your leader in times of trouble still resonates. Some pundits say that this is what allowed George W. Bush to beat out John Kerry and win a second term. Polls showed that more than anything, voters were concerned about global terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. That meant that Bush, the incumbent, was a natural choice for Americans who wanted strength and continuity.

The phrase doesn’t just apply to presidents. In 2009, in the middle of the global economic downturn, MarketWatch urged President Obama to leave Ben Bernanke in his post as chair of the Federal Reserve “so that he can ride out the financial crisis.” 

In March 2020, the New York Post suggested that Donald Trump was trying to portray himself as a “wartime president” in order to win the upcoming election. (The “war” he was engaged in was against the coronavirus pandemic.)

“Donald Trump, making his own case for re-election in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, has been wielding martial rhetoric more and more frequently in his barrage of daily briefings on the unfolding calamity,” The Post wrote. The paper also cited White House economic adviser Peter Navarro, who had told Fox News, “We have essentially a wartime president now, and the war is against this coronavirus. And there can’t be any dissension in the ranks.” The Post reported that Trump’s poll numbers had been up ever since he shifted to the “war president” strategy.

Of course, the “don’t change horses” strategy is not foolproof. In 1932, Herbert Hoover was the incumbent president; his supporters tried to portray him as a sort of wartime leader who was battling the Depression. However, many voters blamed him for the Depression. When Hoover’s supporters urged voters not to change horses, voters chanted, “change horses or drown!”

Hoover was defeated by Franklin Roosevelt. Ironically, FDR went on to win re-election by urging voters, once again, not to change horses in mid stream.

In 1948, when President Truman was running for re-election, he frequently attacked the Republican-controlled Congress as the “do-nothing Congress.”

In fact, the 80th Congress passed 388 public laws, making it hard to call it exactly “do nothing.” But, the president charged that Republicans in Congress were blocking his “Fair Deal” legislation, which would have lowered housing and food costs. In a campaign event in New Jersey, in October of 1948, Truman said:

I have been trying to get the Republicans to do something about high prices and housing ever since they came to Washington.  They are responsible for that situation, because they killed price control, and they killed the housing bill.  That Republican, 80th “do-nothing” Congress absolutely refused to give any relief whatever in either one of those categories.

Some people say I ought not to talk so much about the Republican 80th “do-nothing” Congress in this campaign.  I will tell you why I will talk about it.  If two-thirds of the people stay at home again on election day as they did in 1946, and if we get another Republican Congress like the 80th Congress, it will be controlled by the same men who controlled that 80th Congress…

Since then, of course, the term “do-nothing Congress” has been applied again and again. In 2013, Politico ran a piece arguing that the 113th Congress was “on track to go down as the least productive in history.” (The article was titled The (really) do-nothing Congress.) The author, Manu Raju, noted that at the time of his writing, the 113th Congress had so far enacted only 49 laws, the lowest level since 1947.  

A few years later, in 2016, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake chided the 114th Congress for its inactivity. Blake saw Congress’s inaction as part of a larger trend. He wrote, “With the 114th session of Congress coming to an end, we can now take stock of just how much was accomplished over the past two years. And for this entire decade, the answer to that question has essentially been: not much.” Blake pointed out that Americans are more divided, politically, than ever before, making it harder for politicians to reach across the aisle and make deals.

That trend has only continued, and it’s been aggravated by a series of government shutdowns. By 2019, ABC News reported that members of Congress were, themselves, frustrated by their own inability to pass laws. “What people want from congress is plenty,” ABC News noted. “What they get, can fall short. Both sides are disappointed so far. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), said so far it’s been “100 days of nothing.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called that chamber a “legislative graveyard”.

Of course, as William Safire pointed out, politicians have been accusing each other of being “do nothings” for hundreds of years. In medieval France, the Merovingian dynasty became known as the “do-nothing kings;” in the 20th century, FDR mocked Herbert Hoover as a “do nothing” president. More recently, historians have tried to redeem Hoover’s legacy, but the image of him as a do-nothing president has stuck.

The domino theory was critical in shaping US foreign policy during the Cold War. Domino theory argued that if one nation became communist, its neighboring states would go the same way. In theory, if one state “fell” to communism, its neighbors would also fall, setting off a chain reaction comparable to a line of toppling dominoes.

The drive to contain communism was a major influence on the Truman administration, motivating the government to start providing aid to the French government in Indochina. Truman also assisted Greece and Turkey in the late 1940s in an effort to contain the spread of communism.

However, it was President Eisenhower who really popularized the concept of domino theory. At a press conference in April, 1954, a reporter asked Eisenhower about his opinion on Indochina and its strategic importance. Eisenhower replied, in part:

You have, of course, both the specific and the general when you talk about such things. First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs. Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world.

Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.

Eisenhower returned to this concept repeatedly, in speeches about the “aggressive” nature of communism and the need to contain its spread. The Eisenhower administration also used domino theory to explain why the US was intervening in Indochina but not, for example, in Franco’s Spain. The National Security Council agreed that it did not want to “police the governments of the entire world” – it did, however, want to fight communism and beat out Moscow.

Domino theory was closely linked to US presence in Vietnam. Both the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations used domino theory to justify escalating the American military presence in Vietnam. Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford, was a vocal defender of the theory. Speaking at a press conference in 1975, Kissinger said, “We must understand that peace is indivisible. The United States cannot pursue a policy of selective reliability. We cannot abandon friends in one part of the world without jeopardizing the security of friends everywhere.”

Decades later, President Reagan again referenced domino theory to explain US intervention in Latin America; Reagan argued that any communist presence in Latin America was a threat to the entire Western Hemisphere. “We believe that the government of El Salvador is on the front line of a battle that is really aimed at the very heart of the Western Hemisphere and eventually at us,” Reagan told reporters, adding that if El Salvador were to “fall” to communism, then “I think Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama and all of these would follow.”

The Dixiecrats were a group of Southern Democrats who broke away from their party in 1948 because they objected to the Democratic Party’s stance on desegregation. The Dixiecrats were also known as “States’ Rights Democrats.” They represent part of a massive shift in party allegiance that reshaped the politics of the South during the second half of the 20th century.

Up through the end of the Second World War, the Democratic Party dominated the US South; it was virtually impossible for Southern politicians to win office unless they were Democrats. There were rumbles of discontent in the 1930s, as many southern politicians objected to FDR’s social policies and to his support of the labor movement. Still, southern Democrats remained loyal to their party. 

That all changed in 1948, when President Harry Truman presented a pro-civil rights platform at the party’s political convention. A group of southern Democrats, led by Strom Thurmond, walked out of the convention in protest. Those men, who became known as the Dixiecrats, organized their own, separate presidential convention in Birmingham Alabama; footage from the time shows participants waving confederate flags as they strode into their convention hall. An estimated six thousand people from 13 southern states participated in the convention. 

Their plan was to field their own presidential candidate in the upcoming election. They didn’t expect to win, but they hoped to earn all the southern states’ electoral votes, so that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans would be able to win the election.  This would have meant that the House of Representatives would decide the vote, and the Dixiecrats believed that southern states had enough power in the House to deadlock the outcome until Truman dropped his civil rights platform.

In the event, the Dixiecrats nominated Strom Thurmond as their candidate for president. Fielding L. Wright was nominated as vice president. Thurmond was a prominent opponent of de-segregation efforts. A native of South Carolina, he went on to have a long career in the US Senate, where he eventually became the oldest serving senator (until he was overtaken by Robert Byrd of West Virginia). He made a name for himself as a staunch opponent of civil rights legislation and a proponent of military spending. In 1948, Thurmond received over one million votes. He carried four states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama) and won 39 electoral votes. 

After 1948, the Dixiecrats never fielded another presidential candidate. However, they did meet later that year for a second convention, this time in Oklahoma City. There, they drew up and unanimously adopted a party platform. The platform calls for an end to de-segregation and for an increase in states’ rights. It reads, in part,

“We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one’s associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one’s living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.” 

The “deep state” is a conspiracy theory which suggests that collusion exists within the U.S. political system and a hidden government within the legitimately elected government.

The term “deep state” was a term was originally used to describe a shadow government in Turkey that disseminated propaganda and engaged in violence to undermine the governing party.

However, during President Donald Trump’s administration the term has come to refer to an organized resistance within the government, working to subvert Trump’s presidency. Trump allies blame career bureaucrats, many of whom they see as loyal to former President Barack Obama, for leaking damaging information to the news media.

A Washington Post article suggested that people close to Trump believe these longtime government workers amount to a “Deep State” that could undermine his presidency.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told the New York Times: “We are talking about the emergence of a Deep State led by Barack Obama, and that is something that we should prevent… I think it’s really the Deep State versus the president, the duly elected president.”

Former White House adviser David Gergen told Time magazine the term was appropriated by former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon in order to delegitimize Trump’s critics.

“Death panels” was a political term which falsely referred to the supposed dangers posed by the Affordable Care Act. Some opponents of the law, better known as Obamacare, argued that government-run healthcare could lead to a kind of de-facto euthanasia, if preferential treatment was given to certain tiers of society.

The term “death panels” was coined by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. In a Facebook post on August 7, 2009, Palin wrote.

“The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

Conservative newspapers and commentators quickly agreed with Palin’s claims. Rush Limbaugh said that Palin was “dead right,” and others followed suit. Members of the Tea Party were also quick to get on board with claims about the death panels. And more centrist Republicans also agreed. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa told a crowd of his supporters, “We should not have a government program that determines you’re gonna pull the plug on Grandma.”

Politifact later named Palin’s “death panels” statement the “lie of the year” for 2009. Politifact also pointed out the Palin was not the first conservative to make dramatic claims about Obamacare and vulnerable members of society.

Earlier in 2009, a conservative commentator and former lieutenant governor of New York named Betsy McCaughey issued some dire warnings about Obamacare. McCaughey said that “Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner.” she said on a radio show.

McCaughey was wrong – Obamacare did not require seniors to attend counseling. She may have been referring to a provision in which Medicare would pay for doctors’ appointments for patients who wanted to set up their living wills and other end-of-life issues. However, the rumor continued to spread, and it took years for it to die down. As late as 2016, the Washington Post reported that 29 percent of Americans believed that death panels would ration healthcare resources.

Nearly a decade later, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) also took to social media to talk about death panels. Ocasio Cortez wrote on Twitter that private insurance companies effectively had their own death panels:

Actually, we have for-profit “death panels” now: they are companies and boards saying you’re on your own because they won’t cover a critical procedure or medicine. Maybe if the GOP stopped hiding behind this “socialist” rock they love to throw, they’d actually engage on-issue for once.