Why are Republicans aiding the left in stoking racial animosity?

We should not be surprised Vice President Kamala Harris has attempted to play a new variation of the race card because it always works so well against Republicans.

Her recent attack on Florida neatly deflects her own party’s lamentable historic legacy of supporting slavery and segregation.

The real shock is the number of Republicans who have shamefully lined up to endorse Harris’ deeply cynical and mendacious lie.

By now everyone has heard Harris’ attack on a single sentence in Florida’s new, 23-page African-American history standards: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Read in context, as honest-minded people would do, it is clear the intent of this guideline to emphasize that freed slaves were not utterly helpless that victims but possessed resources to build their own self-sufficiency and resilience.

They needed to be resilient, given the numerous laws (Jim Crow, etc.) Democrats enacted in southern states for a century to continue the oppression of blacks after the Civil War.

The Florida curriculum, by the way, extensively covers the brutality of the slave trade, the evils of post-Civil War segregation and the long struggle for civil rights against the intransigent opposition of the Democratic Party for a full century.

In fact, the real reason Harris and the left have jumped on the Florida curriculum guide is found on page 8: “Examine the condition of slavery as it existed in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe prior to 1619.” (Emphasis added.)

There’s the rub: Florida is contesting the gross distortions of the “1619 Project” beloved by the left, that holds America is to be wholly understood as a “slavocracy,” as though we invented the institution.

To appreciate the bad faith of Harris’ attack, consider this guideline from the national AP History curriculum that Democrats in other states insist be used: “In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers in the North and South. Once free, African Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.”

If Florida had repeated this longer clause in its curriculum guide, Harris could have said the same thing — though don’t hold your breath for her to attack states that use this statement in their curricula.

There is, incidentally, considerable academic work, much it by left-leaning scholars, buttressing the point that freed slaves proved highly resilient amidst great obstacles.

No one, before now, has ever construed this work as evidence that “blacks benefited from slavery.”

It is understandable why a demagogue like Harris would make this attack.

What is inexplicable is the number of prominent Republicans who took Harris’ side.

Presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott, who has up to this point argued powerfully against the divisive identity-politics obsessions of the left, fully embraced Harris’ framing of the issue: “As a country founded upon freedom, the greatest deprivation of freedom was slavery. There is no silver lining . . . in slavery.”

The Florida curriculum neither says nor implies that.

Fellow presidential hopeful Will Hurd and Reps. Byron Donalds, John James and Wesley Hunt joined Scott.

“Real leadership would have stepped up and said, ‘Hey, there is no upside to slavery. Slavery was not a jobs program,’” Hurd said. “But this is one more part of a fact pattern of Ron DeSantis being mean and hateful.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence was only slightly better: “Nothing good ever came from slavery. But I have a hard time believing that Florida intended to say anything other than that in their education standards. I’d encourage the governor to take another look at it.”

This can be chalked up to opportunism among Gov. Ron DeSantis’ rivals for the Republican presidential nomination next year, but it is political malpractice of the highest order.

It’s as if contemporary Republicans have forgotten the GOP voted more heavily in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act than Democrats did.

As The Washington Post reported Monday, “Democrats are worried about a potential drop next year in turnout among Black voters.”

The political fortunes of the Democratic Party depend upon keeping racial tensions at a full boil.

Why would any Republican want to cooperate with the left’s project of stoking racial animosity for electoral purposes, based on bad history and ignoring the appalling record of the Democratic Party as the party of slavery, secession and segregation?

Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.