SOUNDING OFF:

Diane Ewertz (“Don’t equate GOP with all things bad,” Dec. 25) is in high dudgeon over Lenard Davis’ Dec. 11 letter.

It was “intellectually dishonest” for him to attribute a list of historic, progressive achievements to liberals because, Ewertz intones, “we all know that the term liberal is synonymous with the party of Democrats.”

She counters by citing a similar litany on behalf of Republicans. A more comprehensive history lesson would recognize that no political movement is monolithic.

Nixon, for one, offended some Republicans with his support for the Environmental Protection Agency and diplomatic openings with China (for which he deserves high marks).

Lincoln also took an independent course. In crass political terms, he saved the Union but lost the South — to the segregationist southern Democrats he begat.

This pantheon of newly-minted Democrats stayed in the fold for decades after Lincoln, seduced by their party’s long-standing Faustian bargain and its attendant, blatant political advantages. Which left the progressive high ground in Republican hands.

Enter Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, exit the Republican progressive impulse. That so much of his agenda was enacted is due to the support of southern Democrats. In opposition were Republicans who fought Social Security, the Wagner Act, even the World War II draft. But the Democratic heyday came a cropper in 1964. Those southern Democratic solons erupted in near-unison revolt over Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights agenda. So they simply switched parties. Energized by Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the once-Democratic solid South turned red.

Moderate Republicans were spurned. Nelson Rockefeller, for one, was roundly booed at the 1964 GOP convention. “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards sprouted like crab grass. Eisenhower was a “conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” (Robert Welch). McCarthyism was alive and well even if the senator wasn’t.

But Ewertz saves the best for last. Leaving no rock unturned, she looks under yet another. The federal government was “completely embedded with Soviet spies” during the Cold War! Apparently she’s exhumed “a mountain of evidence that is available to anyone who will take the time to do a little reading.” If Ewertz would deign to provide a bibliography, that would be awesome.

As to the Republican progressive tradition that Ewertz celebrates: Her historic sample began with Lincoln, ended with Johnson. The progressive impulse, which flickered occasionally during the Nixon years, was eviscerated in the 1980s. And it’s not likely to recover so long as the GOP is dominated by Reagan redux Republicans.

DICK LEWIS lives in Newport Beach.