Phyllis Schlafly's influence lives on in Donald Trump's candidacy
As a politically aware African-American kid, I saw access to jobs, housing, education, lunch counters and -- not the least important to 12-year-old me -- amusement parks hanging in the balance of that debate. Much of today's conservative GOP began in that year's ideological conflict between the party's moderates and right wing.
Four years later, Lyndon B. Johnson's Civil Rights Act of 1964 would be enacted -- with the crucial help of moderate Republican votes against Southern Democratic segregationist opponents. But Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona voted against it on the same states' rights principles that Schlafly held, and Schlafly loved him for it.
She also achieved national fame that year with her first book, the self-published "A Choice Not an Echo," which attacked the GOP's eastern liberal Rockefeller elites for ignoring Goldwater's grassroots heartland conservatives. It sold more than 3 million copies.
Goldwater won the GOP presidential nomination that year but lost in a November landslide. A liberal resurgence virtually exiled Schlafly and her allies from power in the party. But she wasn't done yet. Her Eagle Forum and its allies staged a comeback that led to the election in 1980 of another veteran of Goldwater's movement, Ronald Reagan.
If much of this factional infighting sounds familiar, children, think of Donald Trump, whom Schlafly endorsed, as today's leader of grassroots conservatives against today's GOP establishment.
The last time I saw Schlafly speak, she was rallying the Conservative Political Action Conference after Mitt Romney's 2012 defeat.
The GOP establishment's "autopsy" called for more outreach to minorities, liberals, women and the young. Schlafly scoffed at that. As delegates roared their approval, she called for them to knock on more doors and rally GOP conservatives who had stayed home.
That sounded like folly to me in light of population changes. But it turned out to be Donald Trump's path to the nomination. Whether it takes him all the way to the White House or not, I expect Phyllis Schlafly's influence to shake up our nation's political scene for years to come.
(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
