Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaks during a town hall, December 18, 2023, in Nevada, Iowa.
Whatever else Nikki Haley may be, she is no idiot. She understands full well that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. What she also understands, however, is that it’s not politic to say so in the state she had governed, in the white South generally, and in right-wing America today.
That alone, though, would not have reduced her to the stammering incoherence of the answer she gave when confronted with the cause-of-the-Civil War question while on the stump in New Hampshire. She is campaigning for president, after all, as the Sensible Republican’s Alternative to Donald Trump. Many (though definitely not all) of the college-educated and country-club Republicans who, while no longer the party’s base, make up the lion’s share of the voters she has been wooing doubtless believe that slavery was indeed the cause of the Civil War. Worse yet, Wall Street deity Jamie Dimon has urged the Democrats in his circle to support her as a way to keep Trump from winning the Republican nomination. And if you’re in Jamie Dimon’s circle, you can write hefty checks.
In Freudian terms, then, Haley’s stammer was overdetermined. Just as fear of alienating the party’s Trump-ophile base has kept Haley and Ron DeSantis from attacking Trump, the same fear rendered her tongue-tied on the slavery question, even as an offsetting fear of alienating New Hampshire’s flinty, if few remaining, empirically guided Republicans reduced her answer to the sheerest babbling.
(In a sense, Haley’s incoherence has its counterpart in Claudine Gay’s incoherence when asked about how Harvard would respond to advocacy of genocide. Each weighed the conflicting concerns of their various constituencies and came out with answers not likely to be entered in the annals of common sense.)
The Southern myths about the causes of the Civil War, about what it was that the South was presumably fighting for, have been with us since 1865. They began to creep northward after Reconstruction ended, and for most of the following century—really, until the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s—the notion that the conflict had been over states’ rights or that slavery wasn’t central to understanding the war’s very essence was the common textbook account of the war. Since then, generations of historians, following the lead of James McPherson, Kenneth Stampp, and Eric Foner, have exhaustively documented slavery’s centrality to the war. In recent decades, however, the rise of fabulist right-wing media has rekindled not just widespread counterfactual beliefs about the present but about the past as well.
In a USA Today/Suffolk University poll out today, fully two-thirds of Trump supporters say they don’t think Joe Biden was legitimately elected president in 2020. It shouldn’t be surprising that those of our compatriots who see themselves as victims of a liberal elite working against the interests of white people associate themselves with the Confederates of the 1860s. Never mind that it was chiefly the wealthy slave owners who advocated secession and that many of the South’s poor white farmers bitterly resented having to abandon their farms to fight for the slaveholders. In the whitewashed stories that many in today’s Republican base have come to believe, such class differences are passed over—just as today’s Republican base voters are defined by their allegiance to a billionaire who they believe will, if not lift them up, at least bring down those they despise.
