GOP has lost its way
By Martha Ezzard
I have eaten the same grits, loved the same mountains and sung the same hymns as Zell Miller, and I've concluded the Georgia senator - who doesn't want to dance anymore with the one what brung him - has twisted history to suit his histrionics.
I am a native Georgian who thinks it's the Republican Party that has forsaken its roots: equal rights, civil liberties and government that stays out of our personal lives.
If the Democratic Party is the captive of the "loony left," as Miller claims, the Republican Party has sold its soul to the radical right and divorced itself from the First Amendment to marry church and state.
Institutionalizing such extremism, the Texas GOP even has a plank in its platform pledging to dispel "the myth" of church and state separation.
It's true that Democrats have always made a place for liberal extremists in their tattered tent. Still, unlike the gated GOP, no litmus tests are required for entry, not even a "Mother Jones" subscription card.
With the election of Ronald Reagan, the GOP turned its back on a long history of defending individual liberties and environmental preservation. Oil rigs now replace antelope. Party members pledge anti-abortion allegiance. Affirmative action must end.
Having grown up in the South, I wanted no part of the segregationist party that ruled Georgia through the Talmadge dynasty of my childhood and, later on, the pick-ax politics of Lester Maddox.
When my husband's career took us to Colorado, I took a position as press aide to one of the nation's last liberal Republican governors, the late John Love. Later, I was elected as a Republican to the Legislature, just in time to bump up against the Coors' funded Reagan revolution in the West.
"Isn't this the party of Abraham Lincoln?" I'd ask my GOP colleagues as I marched with Democratic women for equal rights and abortion rights.
No, came the answer, this is the party of Phyllis Schlafly and the cookie-baking Eagle Forum.
"Isn't this the party of Teddy Roosevelt?" I'd ask, as I watched my environmental initiatives shot down by my own party.
No, came the answer, this is the party of James Watt, the GOP interior secretary who was finally forced from office after opening wilderness areas to energy exploitation.
"Isn't this the party of Dwight D. Eisenhower?" I asked as Republicans spent billions on a flawed Star Wars defense system that kept safe only the pocketbooks of the military-industrial complex.
In 1986, when I ran for statewide office, I heard my husband say to some rural women: "Nah, she's not one of those women's libbers."
Furious, I asked him what in the world he was doing. "Keep quiet," he said, "I just got you the GOP chairman in Kit Carson County." But a pro-choice Republican in the party of Pat Robertson was doomed even when talking to farmers about the price of wheat.
I later resigned my state Senate seat, then changed parties - but I can't say that I would be comfortable in either party today, and I suspect I'm not the only one who feels that way.
(Even though we opinion writers comment on political philosophy, we avoid direct partisan involvement.)
Miller thinks liberal Democrats are out of step with the conservative South. But President Bush, as he shrinks our liberties and dictates our moral lives, is hardly an authentic conservative.
In the end, Miller is right about only one thing: the danger of extremism to the two-party system.
Respected journalist Walter Lippman, whose observations about American politics chronicled our century until he died in 1974, said moderation in both parties was key to democracy's survival.
In 1938, when New Deal Democrats were trying to purge nonbelievers, Lippman wrote: "The party system has worked in America precisely because there are conservatives, moderates and radicals in both parties, and in comparatively equal proportions. … It has meant that the central mass of moderate citizens has always been stronger than the extremists."
Miller is hard at work destroying what's left of moderation in the South.
* Martha Ezzard writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, P.O. Box 4689, Atlanta, GA 30302; e-mail: mezzard@ajc.com. |
