Republican Elite's Disconnect From Voters Behind Nikki Haley’s Civil War Gaffe
GOP voters want nationalism, not racism
On Wednesday, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley raised eyebrows and made headlines for her response to a question at an event in New Hampshire. A voter asked her to define the cause of the Civil War.
“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And we will always stand by the fact that I think the government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people,” she said.
Haley gave a circuitous, meandering reply that didn’t seem to touch upon any of the causes of the Civil War at all. “It was never meant to be all things to all people,” she said. “Government doesn't need to tell you how to live your life. They don't need to tell you what you can and can't do. They don't need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom.”
The questioner was taken aback by Haley’s response, telling her that he was astonished that she didn’t mention slavery at all in her answer.
“What do you want me to say about slavery?” asked Haley before moving on.
The blowback towards Haley was swift, with countless media outlets highlighting her comments and refusal to invoke the primary factor that produced the Civil War: namely, the Southern states’ fear that the North would crack down on enslavement.
It’s true that there were social, historical, and economic factors involved in secession. The legal question of whether states had the right to peacefully secede from the union was chief among them.
But the South that went through with secession viewed the preservation of slavery as their chief grievance. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” Mississippi wrote in its official declaration to secede.
“Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth,” wrote Mississippi. “These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”
It would be easy to say that Haley’s evasive answer was the consequence of a childhood spent in South Carolina, one of the ex-Confederate states where some are still attached to what is called “Lost Cause” narratives of the Civil War that glorify Confederate leaders and tend to downplay slavery as a motivation for the conflict.
This narrative emerged largely as a psychological response to the defeat in the war; many white Southerners, seeking to save face, whitewashed the pro-slavery motivations of Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis so that they could portray their ancestors’ struggle as noble. The Lost Cause was also bound up with efforts during the Jim Crow era to revive the Confederate battle flag as a state symbol in resistance to efforts to grant African Americans full civil rights.
But it would be hard to portray Haley, of all people, as a proponent of Lost Cause revisionism. After all, she was the South Carolina governor who moved to have the Confederate battle flag removed from the state capitol.
In fact, her 2015 address to the state about why she felt the flag needed to be removed after the shooting by white nationalist Dylan Roof went to pains to note that to many South Carolinians, the flag was a “deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past.” Of the flag, she said: “The fact that it causes pain to so many is enough to move it from the Capitol grounds. It is, after all, a Capitol that belongs to all of us.”
But Haley, of course, is a politician. She’s seeking to win votes, and there are signs in polling that she may be close to overtaking Florida governor Ron DeSantis to take the number two spot in the primary (but far behind frontrunner and former president Donald Trump).
So it’s likely that Haley thought the best way to court those Republican primary voters would be to avoid the topic of slavery altogether, lest she alienate votes she needs to win by insinuating that the South was wrong to secede from the country. The fact that she sought to clean up her remarks on Thursday by stating that “of course” the Civil War was about slavery only makes her words seem even more political – as if she was doing calculations in her mind about what historical narrative would get her the most votes.
But Haley’s imagination of what the GOP electorate believes may be badly outdated.