I always thought the Civil War was a pretty easy subject to tackle, especially if you regard yourself as an American citizen. Apparently, it is more difficult for those who live in the South. It seems they still haven't gotten over losing the war. But, Nimarata"Nikki" Haley is different. Her parents are both immigrant Sikhs from India. You would think she would have no Southern identification, yet she grew up in South Carolina and seems to have absorbed the "Lost Cause" hook, line and sinker. She got a big F at a rally when asked, What was the cause of the Civil War?
I grew up in the South too but I learned pretty quickly that the root cause of the war was slavery. You'd hear these constant arguments about states' rights but the right they were talking about was to continue to have slaves while the rest of the country moved toward a free market economy. The industrial revolution was in full bloom when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Unfortunately, the South was still stuck in an agrarian society wholly reliant on slaves to bring their biggest cash crop to market. Granted, a lot of Northern states benefited from this. The entire textile industry was predicated on a cheap supply of cotton.
The same for Britain and France, which were also buying Southern cotton, although Britain had begun to develop an alternative in Egypt, which had been cultivating cotton for millennia. However, the Southern states remained their primary source. Not surprisingly, the Southern states thought they could hold the Northern states over a bale, so to speak, but the blockades cut off their link to Europe. The Confederate States of America tried to literally undermine the blockade with torpedo boats, but they were unable to break the blockade and bring their precious crop to market. It was only a matter of time before their confederacy crumpled, which it finally did in 1865.
Many thought Nimarata was different. After all this is the same woman who as governor of South Carolina had the Confederate flag lowered on the state capitol after the horrendous massacre in the Mother Emmanuel AME Church at Charleston in 2015. Yet at this New Hampshire rally, she fell back on the states' rights argument, treating Washington like "big brother" forcing its way on the poor Southern people who were just expressing their individual identity. It doesn't matter that one-third of the population in the South had no rights at all thanks to punitive slave laws. In South Carolina, slaves represented the majority of the population. If she had lived in the South back then, she wouldn't have had any rights either. So, who exactly is she appealing to? She tried to walk back her statement in subsequent interviews but the damage was done.
This is what happens when you try to play toward a conservative audience that still very much embraces the American antebellum past. As an Indian woman of Sikh heritage this is particularly odd, as her parents grew up in British India and confronted this kind of blatant racism first hand. It was probably part of the reason they moved to the United States, thinking they would enjoy more liberties than they had in their home country. She not only shames her parents' legacy but the Republican heritage she claims to represent. After all, it was a Republican president who emancipated the slaves.
Such irony is lost on her and the millions of Americans who identify with today's Republican Party. It is a far cry from the Party of Lincoln, which I imagine is what the questioner at the rally was trying to highlight. Today's party is perfectly comfortable dredging up this antebellum past because it is riddled with former Dixiecrats turned Republicans who fully identify with the Lost Cause. They believe the Southern states should have been free to carry on the way they did because in their mind the Constitution was never anything more than a mutually agreed upon contract that they could break if they felt it tread on their states' rights.
For that reason, the Southern states cited the Declaration of Independence and original Articles of Confederation in formally seceding from the Union in 1861. The Constitution was no longer valid in their minds, despite most of the states having come into existence after the Constitution had been ratified in 1790.
Republicans disagreed. Lincoln at first tried to cajole the Southern states back into the Union, saying he never had any intent of abolishing slavery but there were too many abolitionists in the Republican Party for the Southern Democrats to believe him. Still, the Union fumbled around for two years trying to get the Southern states to demure before Lincoln finally issued an Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. At that point, the tide of the war shifted and the Southern states began to lose ground. Still, they held on "nobly" throughout the South, as personified in films like "Gone with the Wind," until they ran out of supplies and General Lee was forced to surrender at Appomattox on behalf of exiled president Jefferson Davis in April, 1865. The great experiment lasted four years but to hear those who assert their Southern pride, it lives on forever, which is why we continue to see Confederate battle flags everywhere.
Nimarata would have never taken down that battle flag had not Dylann Roof opened fire on a black congregationalist church. This was such a blatant example of white supremacy that even she was forced to take action. She was quite proud of her bold move in a state that was the first to secede in December, 1860, but has since walked back her actions. This is what happens when you choose to identify yourself with Trump's movement.
Trump himself has played the Civil War from a wide variety of angles, most recently claiming he could have negotiated a settlement back in 1861. He didn't elaborate. It was enough for him to say so for his followers to believe him. I always thought Nimarata was smarter than this but apparently not. The MAGA movement has dumbed down the entire American narrative and if you want to be a part of it you have to atleast play dumb.
I just don't know how any of these persons can call themselves Republicans when the entire reason for fighting the war was to retain the Republic as we know it. This not only meant doing away with the pernicious institution of slavery but bringing the Southern states into the modern industrial world, which they did so kicking and screaming. It took an additional 100 years to pass Civil Rights legislation that gave persons of color the same access to state and private institutions as whites.
Nimarata wouldn't be where she is today without this legislation. Yet, Nikki is against affirmative action too. Now that she has access she doesn't believe other persons of color should have any of the benefits she enjoyed. This is what makes it so hard to square her pleasant image with her ever shifting political rhetoric. When drawn out, she quickly tries to deflect questions back on the questioner as she did in New Hampshire or call out President Biden for his "racist past" when he reminded Nimarata why the Civil War was fought in his speech at the Mother Emanuel AME Church.
I don't know how much of this will be gained or lost on the public. For the most part, Americans don't really like to delve into history except how it directly relates to their genealogy. At worst it is just an embarrassing moment for Nimarata. Her backers, like Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, still have full faith in her even if it appears she has no chance of stopping the Trump juggernaut in the primaries. If she had hoped to be Vice President on his ticket that now seems less likely because she will just be seen as another "loser."
More worrisome is the inability of any Republican to stand up for the values of their party. After all, this is a political party born out of the crucible of the Civil War and for many years was seen as a progressive party. So much so that Karl Marx expressed his admiration for Abraham Lincoln. Even worse, Lincoln admired Marx. It was the Republican Party that pushed for labor laws, public schools and hospitals and a better way of life for Americans. It really wasn't until the 1950s that we saw a shift in Republican thinking, and not until 1964 when Goldwater ran against the Civil Rights Bill that we saw the Republican Party essentially renounce everything it previously stood for. Even then you still had Rockefeller Republicans who believed in Civil Rights and Women's Rights, but by the time Reagan came along in the 1980s they were purged too. The party has become completely overtaken by Religious Conservatives and Libertarians, who no longer represent the founding values of the Republican Party.
The main agenda of the GOP was to stop the expansion of slavery into the new territories. Republicans were a combination of abolitionists, former Whigs and Free Soilers who sought to contain and ultimately eradicate this pernicious institution. It is painfully obvious that Nimarata "Nikki" Haley has no idea what she stands for, much less represents as a Republican candidate for President.
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