Republicans are not Leftists. Arguably they were for a few short years immediately following the Civil War with Reconstruction, but that was it, they soon returned to being Right Wing authoritarians.
Then again, that can also be said of Reconstruction, that the effort was a punitive Right Wing authoritarian one whose actual intent was to wreck the South's economy and keep it dependent on the North.
Republicans are not only trying to erase history from history books, they're doing it everywhere from the Smithsonian, to National Parks, to even the Pentagon's own files. According to official US history now, Little Boy magically materialized out of nothing over Hiroshima before dropping on it and there was no such thing as the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman, etc.