Cliven Bundy’s nostalgia for slavery is not news because a cartoonish rancher said something racist. That probably happens every day in bars throughout the west and the former confederate states of the south (no offense to non-racists in those regions). The real news is in the GOP reaction. It would be one thing if some fringe Tea Party wackjobs jumped on the Bundy bandwagon prior to his racist rant. But no. Mainstream Tea Party wackjobs, like Kentucky Senator and 2016 presidential hopeful Rand Paul, hopped aboard as well.

Of course, they jumped of the Bundy clown car following the rancher’s repulsive statement (although it took Paul an entire day). Yet, the fact that they’d align themselves with an ideologue whose views all too often go hand-in-hand with racism is revealing. The GOP seems to operate under the assumption that the advocates of states’ rights, secession and radical libertarianism are principled paragons of tolerance. They assume that formerly unabashed racists and their descendants have somehow, in the span of a few decades, abandoned racism completely. For one to bring up the possibility that racism still lingers is to play the race card.

Never mind that the ideology of these modern-day racists is nearly identical to those of overt racists. These are the kinds of people who fought for slavery and Jim Crow, who enforced segregation, who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the name of “states rights” and even now continue to pass legislation aimed at barring minorities from voting. The only difference is that now, they’re expected to speak in code, using words like “inner city,” “welfare queen,” “takers,” and a slew of other thinly-veiled euphemisms so they can claim the mantle of principled anti-federalism and obscure the racist nature of their ideology.

However, every so often, someone like Cliven Bundy forgets to censor himself. Cue the parade of conservatives lining up to throw their ideological kin under the bus because he slipped up and said what many of them are thinking. The truth is, much of conservatives’ anger at “big government” derives from lingering bitterness at the humiliation of being forced to renounce their institutionalized racism. Consciously or not, they are aware of this and are hypersensitive to any claims that, just maybe, racism that’s persisted for many generations doesn’t just evaporate in a few decades. To claim this is not just illogical; it’s ahistorical.

None of this is to say that all or even most conservatives are racist in the classic sense of the term. Many have no personal problem with minorities and interact with them on a daily basis. And yes, many of them have multiple “minority friends.” But none of this cancels out the fact that their ideology is historically intertwined with racism and appeals to racists for that very reason. And even the most tolerant person is implicitly supporting or condoning racism when they vote for a party whose policies disproportionately harm minorities. Cliven Bundy is only the tip of an iceberg that runs through American institutions and culture, threatening to turn back the legacy of the civil rights movement if we do not stay vigilant.