Nikki Haley Tap Dances Her Way Through Civil War History
What a Christmas present for Donald Trump!
Nikki Haley is a morally bankrupt opportunist, as I’ve covered repeatedly over at Wonkette. This week, at a New Hampshire town hall, she disappointed her growing anti-Trump Republican fan club when she couldn’t answer a remedial history question about the Civil War.
VOTER: What was the cause of the United States Civil War?
HALEY: Don't come with an easy question, right? I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was gonna run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do. What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?
Jesus, she just babbles for a while before asking the voter to give her the answer — classic topsy turvy maneuver but it felt a little defensive. It’s like when Kramer pretended he was Moviefone: “Why don’t you just tell me where you want to see the movie?” The voter reminded Haley that he’s not the one (pointlessly) running for president.
Haley is the former governor of South Carolina, so this was both a relevant and easy question. The documented, historical motivations and reasons for secession are fairly straightforward. Slavery was mentioned in almost every future Confederate state’s declaration of secession. Here’s a key passage from South Carolina’s own declaration:
Those [non-slaveholding] States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace...property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the Common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the Common Government, because he has declared that the "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that Slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
The Charleston Mercury wrote on November 3, 1860: “The issue before the country is the extinction of slavery ... The Southern States are now in the crisis of their fate; and, if we read aright the signs of the times, nothing is needed for our deliverance, but that the ball of revolution be set in motion.”
Haley shared some more gibberish without ever mentioning the word “slavery” or “Black people.”
"I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government,” she said. “We need to have capitalism, we need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”
As former “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek used to say, “No, that too is wrong.” Haley is peddling Lost Cause propaganda, but the reality is clear. Historian Stephanie McCurry wrote in The Atlantic: “For the four years of its existence, until it was forced to surrender, the Confederate States of America was a pro-slavery nation at war against the United States. The C.S.A. was a big, centralized state, devoted to securing a society in which enslavement to white people was the permanent and inherited condition of all people of African descent. The Confederates built an explicitly white-supremacist, pro-slavery, and antidemocratic nation-state, dedicated to the principle that all men are not created equal.”
This isn’t hard, but Haley felt misused when the voter said, “In the year 2023, it's astonishing to me that you can answer that question without mentioning the word 'slavery.'"
“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Haley responded. I dunno, maybe that slavery is bad? And that the United States kicked the moral can down the road until there was no alternative but to fight a bloody war over whether such a barbaric institution would continue and even expand across the continent.
Haley has performed this dance before. In 2010, when she was running for governor, the Sons of Confederate Veterans grilled her about the Confederate flag and why she believed the Civil War was fought. This was her pathetic response:
“I think you had one side of the Civil War that was fighting for tradition and another side of the Civil War that was fighting for change,” she said. “At the end of the day, I think what we need to remember is everyone is supposed to have their rights, everyone is supposed to be free, everyone is supposed to have the same freedoms as anyone else, so I think it was tradition versus change is the way that I see it.”
You can see that she’s attempting to give herself plausible deniability — maybe enslaved human beings should have basic human rights but maybe the monsters who profit off their flesh should have the freedom to enjoy mint juleps on the porch. Who can say?
What’s revealing is that she gives the same answer in New Hampshire, a union state where slavery was abolished in 1857. Haley isn’t stupid. She knows that she’s playing to the same audience as she was during her meeting with the Sons of White Supremacist Traitors. Republicans might claim they are the “Party of Lincoln” and that Democrats are the “party of the Klu Klux Klan,” but they wave their freakish Confederate flags high when campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination.
Haley tried to clean up her mess Thursday during an interview with a local radio station. “Of course the Civil War was about slavery,” she said. “We know that. That's the easy part of it. I know it's about slavery. I am from the South.”
Yet, she didn’t say “slavery.” Haley didn’t leave any room for evasive answers to “complicated” question when condemning university presidents.
She went on:
“Yes, we know the Civil War was about slavery. But more than that, what’s the lesson in all this? That freedom matters. And individual rights and liberties matter for all people. That’s the blessing of America. That was a stain on America when we had slavery. But what we want is [to] never relive it, never let anyone take those freedoms away again.”
Oh well, not everyone can possess the political skill necessary to immediately answer “slavery is bad.” Haley apparently needed to sleep on it first. She later suggested that she was somehow set up with this fifth-grade level question.
“(The voter)” was definitely a Democrat plant,” she said. “When [they] asked him, he didn’t want to answer. He didn’t give reporters his name.”
I have to question her slightly paranoid, deductive reasoning here. New Hampshire has more unaffiliated voters (39 percent) than Republican (29 percent) and Democratic (30 percent). The voter’s reaction was consistent more with the state’s fiercely independent “live free or die” vibe than any Democratic skullduggery.
The Civil War question isn’t a “gotcha,” considering that Haley herself has expressed support for a national abortion ban because like her conservative forbears, she cannot accept that certain people might enjoy freedom outside her own oppressive state. Haley is trying to present as the “normal” alternative to Trump, and she might’ve gotten away from it, if that voter hadn’t pulled off her Scooby-Doo villain mask.
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In 1861, a critic commented on South Carolina's decision to secede from the Union by saying that the state was "too small to be an independent nation and too large to be a lunatic asylum."
I guess very little has changed.
What a horse's brass! With the idiocy of her statement she may not be stupid as you say but she is transparently courting the white supremacy vote like the Evil Orange.