Saturday was the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the march in Selma, Alabama that propelled the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. President Obama and President George W. Bush both attended. So did more than a hundred members of Congress. Only one member of the Republican leadership, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, made the trip.

In a powerful essay comparing Martin Luther King, Jr. and the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement to George Washington and the Founding Fathers, conservative writer Charles C. W. Cooke of National Review took the Republican leadership to task. Cooke argues, as did President Obama in his speech, that the desire for liberty, justice and freedom sought by the marchers at Selma was borne of the same impulses that led to the American Revolution. “As it would be unthinkable for the leadership of the Republican party to ignore July Fourth, it should be unthinkable for its luminaries not to celebrate the anniversary of the March to Montgomery either,” he wrote.

Cooke, of course, is right. Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party, particularly in the South, has ceded power to its ugliest and most reactionary factions. With anti-intellectual fervor, they’re trying to rewrite history like they’ve tried to discredit science. Civil rights are ignored while gun rights are sacred. Their hold is so powerful, few Republicans have addressed the continuing stream of unarmed black men killed by police and trigger happy white men. While African-American parents fear for their children, Republicans fear offending the reactionary voices that blame the victims.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) changed the name of the Senate Judicial sub-committee on the Constitution and Civil and Human Rights to just the Committee on the Constitution. Meanwhile, for the first time in 50 years, the Republican-led Congress has failed to renew the Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court declared parts of it out of date and urged Congress to fix it. In states across the country, Republican legislatures restricted access to the ballot box, making it harder for minorities, the elderly and the poor to vote.

In North Carolina, the influence of the reactionaries has spread from the halls of the legislature to the overseers of the university system. They fired University of North Carolina President Tom Ross–not for wrongs, mismanagement or incompetence but for his political affiliation. They’ve tried to silence the people who advocate for our most vulnerable citizens and those who dare to criticize the actions of our Republican-led General Assembly by closing centers and restricting funding.

These reactionary forces aren’t inherent to the Republican Party even though they are now ingrained in the party structure. In 1965, at the time of the Selma march, those forces lived within the Democratic Party of the one-party South. Republican Members of Congress led the fight for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Assistant Attorney General John Doar, a Republican who served under Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, fought side-by-side with the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. These Republicans championed the achievements the current party leaders will barely acknowledge.

With the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans could have courted and recruited the massive number of newly registered African-American voters in the South. Instead, they gave up their claim to the mantle of Lincoln and invited the defeated segregationists to join their ranks. Nixon’s Southern Strategy provided a new political home for the ignorant, angry whites who were betrayed by one of their own in the White House.

Lyndon Johnson stood up to his fellow Southerners to do what was right instead of what was politically expedient. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, Johnson told aides, “We just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” Republicans need to find their Lyndon Johnson.

Supporting civil rights is not inconsistent with free-market principles and smaller government, even if some of the current remedies for past abuses are. Somebody needs to remind the Republican Party who they once were because they’ve become the reactionary Southern Democrats they once vigorously opposed. If they can come to terms with their current transgressions against their fellow Americans, maybe on March 7, 2040, the 75th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Democrats and Republicans will both stand at the Edmund Pettus Bridge while the forces of reaction find themselves with no home in either major party.

Thomas Mills

Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >