Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

Why can't politicians like Nikki Haley quit the Confederacy?

"Stone Mountain Memorial Closeup" by Peter Kaminski is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

“Gaffe” coverage is the stupidest political coverage, as I have been complaining for years (see here or here), and the dust-up over Nikki Haley’s recent deep thoughts on the Civil War is no exception. It became such a big deal mostly because the presidential race to this point has been profoundly boring for reporters, and they’re desperate for any kind of controversy they can write about. Nevertheless, this does create an opportunity to explore some genuinely important and interesting things about the Republican Party, the South, the Confederacy, and Haley herself, who will not be president this time around but could well be the Republican nominee in 2028. 

Here’s what she said at an event in Berlin, NH when an audience member asked her what the cause of the Civil War was:

“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do…I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. 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. We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure 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.”

You may be saying, Hold on — whose “rights and freedoms” are you talking about here? The slaves’? The slaveowners’? If the Civil War was about whether government is going to “tell you what you can and can’t do,” that sounds a lot like a defense of the Confederacy. Trouble is, if you say forthrightly that the Civil War was about slavery, that makes it impossible to portray the South as anything other than the villain it was, which a South Carolina politician learns not to do.

Haley later did some clean up (“I mean, of course the Civil War was about slavery”), but this demonstrates that while she may join the culture war with vigor, she’s not an instinctive culture warrior. Had it been Ron DeSantis, for instance, he would have said, “The cause of the Civil War was the Democrat Party! They did it! Slavery was Democrats, and so was Jim Crow! And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the radical left make us feel bad about it!” [hold for applause] 

The real story of Haley and the Confederate flag

Many of the stories about the Civil War remarks mention, as evidence of Haley’s good will, that she signed a bill removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house when she was governor. But that leaves out most of what’s important about that story. 

The flag was hoisted over the state house in 1962, during a period in which Confederate flags and monuments were being frantically erected across the South as a big middle finger to the civil rights movement, and a reminder to Black Southerners of who was in charge and who had better remember their place. 

When she ran for governor in 2010, Haley rejected calls to remove the flag from the statehouse grounds. In an interview with a group called the Palmetto Patriots, she said that if anyone had “issues about the Confederate flag,” she’d explain to them “about the heritage, and how this is not something that is racist, this is something that is a tradition that people feel proud of.” 

Then she was asked the same question she got asked in New Hampshire: Why was the Civil War fought? And guess what, she gave an answer that was very similar to the one she gave in 2023:

“I think that as we look in government, as we watch government, you have different sides. And I think that you see passions on different sides. And I don’t think anyone does anything out of hate. I think what they do is they do things out of tradition and out of beliefs of what they believe is right. I think you had one side of the Civil War that was fighting for tradition and I think you had another side of the Civil War that was fighting for change. You know, at the end of the day what I think we need to remember is that, you know, everyone is supposed to have their rights, everyone’s supposed to be free, everyone’s supposed to have the same freedoms as anyone else. So you know, I think it was tradition versus change is the way I see it.”

I’m sure that when she gave this interview, Haley knew very well that neo-Confederates like the ones interviewing her talk a lot about “freedom” as the cause of the Civil War. For instance, if you watch the video on the main page of the Sons of Confederate Veterans web site, you’ll learn that “The citizen soldiers who fought for the Confederacy personified the best qualities of America. The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution.” So when she says “everyone’s supposed to be free,” there’s a good chance she’s intending that to be heard by anyone as supporting their perspective on the Civil War. Most people will respond, “Duh, of course it was about freedom, the freedom of people not to be enslaved.” But neo-Confederates can hear her as advocating for the “freedom” of the Confederacy to keep slaves without the federal government bothering them about it.

"222 - Columbia, South Carolina" by Jason Lander is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

 The flag continued to be an issue throughout Haley’s first term, and she continued to resist calls to remove it. Running for reelection in 2014, she said proudly that the CEOs she spoke with as she worked to recruit jobs to the state never brought it up, and besides, the perception of South Carolina as a racist place was all taken care of. “But we really kind of fixed all that when you elected the first Indian-American female governor. When we appointed the first African-American U.S. senator [Haley appointed Tim Scott to fill a vacant Senate seat], that sent a huge message." Problem solved!

But after Dylann Roof massacred nine people at a Black church in Charleston in 2015,  images showed up online of him posing with the Confederate flag, and calls to remove it from the statehouse intensified until Haley finally had a change of heart. In her telling, flying the Confederate flag was just fine until Roof came along and ruined it for everybody:

“Here is this guy who comes out with his manifesto holding the Confederate flag and had just hijacked everything that people thought of,” Haley said, according to a video of the interview on BlazeTV. “We don’t have hateful people in South Carolina. There’s always the small minority who are always going to be there, but people saw it as service, sacrifice and heritage. But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it.”

So she reversed her stance and asked the legislature to remove it from the state house. It was only possible, she says, because mean liberals weren’t around whining about racism: “Today’s outrage culture would instead have made the case that everyone who respects the Confederate flag is an evil racist,” she wrote, and then Republicans wouldn’t have voted to remove it, because they only do the right thing when Democrats stop making them feel bad.

"Alamance County Trump Convoy and Ride (2020 Sept)" by Anthony Crider is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

What matters is fighting the libs

The one constant in Haley’s rhetoric around race is that racism is a thing of the past — it was a problem once, but not anymore. Now we all get along, and the only people who get worked up about stuff like slavery or the Confederacy are dastardly liberals who want to divide us. That’s the racial absolution Haley has always offered conservatives, one made more powerful by the fact of her minority status: Because racism exists only in the past, not only don’t you have to feel bad about what sure looks like persistent racism today, you can go ahead and get as worked up as you like about Barack Obama or critical race theory or the Great Replacement and not worry that you’re being racist. You can’t be, because racism is over. The only racism that remains is White people being unfairly called racist by liberals.

This is a narrative that unites the genuine racists in the party with the anti-antiracists, which is basically every other Republican. The anti-antiracists may or may not have racial animus in their hearts, but they are passionately, angrily committed to the idea that racism is essentially over; efforts to ameliorate existing racism are immoral; and the government must devote itself to quashing not only policies like affirmative action but any discussion of racism that considers it as either a contemporary phenomenon or a feature of structures and institutions, rather than just something that lies within a few contemptible individuals.

Anti-antiracism has become as central to Republican ideology as the belief that taxes should be low or that reproductive rights should be eliminated, if not more so. Haley surely understands this, but in the moment she may fall back on old habits and offer up a familiar version of the Lost Cause narrative, that noble Southerners fought for their homes, their “traditions,” and their “heritage.” Or even more stupidly, that the war was about some vague philosophical notions of how limited government should be.

But most Republicans, especially outside the South, don’t really need to hear that, and Haley didn’t need to fear how they’d react. They don’t feel a powerful emotional connection to the cause of the Confederacy. Even if they’re committed to a contemporary culture war that is deeply infused with race, it’s not about what happened 150 years ago for them. They know the Civil War was about slavery, and they don’t mind hearing it; they’re more concerned with what you’re going to do to stop the immigrant horde.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t game for some occasional pandering to the Confederacy, which Haley’s opponents are eager to offer; Ron DeSantis has promised that if he becomes president he will revert Fort Liberty in North Carolina to its previous name of Fort Bragg, and Donald Trump has long defended Confederate memorials of all kinds, despite the fact that Trump couldn’t tell you who the odious Braxton Bragg was if his life depended on it.

But that’s different from what Haley was afraid of, that if you say out loud that slavery caused, the war, you’ll lose the support of a key constituency. She was talking as though she was still in South Carolina, where some have very strong opinions about the Confederacy that go far deeper than Owning the Libs. But that’s not what animates most Republicans elsewhere. And that’s the bottom line for anyone wanting to lead the GOP: Hatred of liberals must be your North Star. Everything else is secondary.