Monday marked Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a national holiday honoring a man best remembered for urging Americans to judge one another by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It is a legacy rooted in a specific historical struggle — one that culminated in the Civil Rights Act after years of fierce resistance, largely from Southern Democrats, to dismantling Jim Crow.
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Since that era ended, the Democratic Party has repeatedly searched for what might come next: a successor to the civil rights movement that once defined its moral authority. Over the decades, a series of causes have been framed in those terms, often with strained comparisons to the racial discrimination of the mid-20th century.
First came a
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