If some of the holiday spirit of charity remains, you might take a moment to sympathize with Nikki Haley. Appearing at a town hall in Berlin, New Hampshire, Haley was asked what was the cause of the United States Civil War. Haley stalled for a moment, then served a massive portion of word salad:
I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run the freedoms [sic] 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. That was never meant to be all things to all people [sic].
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 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.
Haley is neither stupid nor ignorant, and it’s safe to assume she has some inkling of the causes of the Civil War, whose first shots were fired in her home state. It’s shopworn advice to politicians that, when asked a question you don’t want to answer, you just answer the question you wish you had been asked, instead. Haley clearly didn’t wish to address the causes of the Civil War, so she simply pretended she had been asked to please provide a list of vacuous platitudes.
But for the “answer the question you wish you’d been asked” trick to be effective, it can’t be too obvious that you’re doing it. In this case, Haley’s failure to even mention slavery when asked to comment on the Civil War gave away the game.
What is striking is that Haley thought — likely correctly — that a simple, historical question about a war that ended over 158 years ago needed to be dodged. Haley was born and educated in South Carolina, and eventually became its governor. She will be all too familiar with the power of the Lost Cause myth, which, to paraphrase Faulkner, is not dead, or even past — especially among certain groups of voters with whom Haley is trying to remain popular.
The Lost Cause myth holds that the Civil War had multiple causes, but slavery was definitely not one. According to the myth, the war pitted a materialistic, industrialized, amoral, and rapacious North — a sort of evil empire — against an honorable, agrarian, völkisch society of God-fearing freeholders earning an honest living not in shady financial speculation or industrial manipulation but in working the land by the sweat of the brows of people they owned. The South wanted only to be left in peace in its wholesome ways, but the North could not restrain its greed and launched a war of aggression, which the South resisted with great, but ultimately hopeless, valor. The South seceded as a matter of principle: it was a question of “the role of government and what the rights of the people are”, as Haley said. It certainly wasn’t about slavery.
As a matter of history, the Lost Cause myth is preposterous. South Carolina, in its Declaration of Secession, cited “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery.” In the decades preceding the War, it had become clear that the practice of slavery was in decline. The idea that people captured in Africa and brought to the Americas against their will were not chattel, but human beings, was spreading alarmingly. Far from merely wanting to be left alone, the South wanted the practice of slavery to be expanded into the new states and territories of the West. Schemes were hatched to annex Cuba and Nicaragua to the US, to add more slave regions to the United States, so that pro-slavery forces could maintain political power. The South sensed that it was on the wrong side of history, a state of affairs it found intolerable.
In fact, the Lost Cause myth originated decades after the War had ended, as an attempt at retroactive exculpation, once Reconstruction had failed and the North had exhausted its will to enforce the Constitution south of the Mason-Dixon line. It was largely created, and heavily promoted, by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which was established 29 years after the end of the War. The UDC was responsible for the erection of those Confederate monuments that are the subject of controversy today, as well as pushing Lost Cause mythology into history textbooks. The UDC, and the Lost Cause myth it promoted, provided the underpinning and legitimizing mythology for the Jim Crow era, in which the white South established a regime of systematic racial oppression that was, de facto, an only modestly attenuated variant of slavery.
Haley probably knows all this. But she also knows that a constituency she wants to woo doesn’t want to hear it. Would it have been possible to thread the needle, to reference slavery, at least in passing, without hemorrhaging potential supporters who will abandon her for someone less “woke”? We’ll never know.
Like the other candidates challenging Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for President, Haley had to choose one of two lanes, both of which seem hopeless. The first is the Christie lane: tell the truth about Donald Trump, about his profound psychological, moral, and intellectual deficits, about the mortal danger his dictatorial impulses pose to the Republic, and hope to reawaken the spirit of the old Republican Party: fiscally and socially conservative, favoring a government modest in ambitions but high in integrity, combined with an activist foreign policy. People will quarrel over whether that “old” GOP ever existed, or whether it, too, was a self-serving myth. But in an important way, that quarrel is moot: whether or not it ever existed, it does not today, in any significant number. And that means Chris Christie won’t be the Republican nominee for President in 2024.
Haley chose the other lane: appeal to Trump supporters by being much like Trump, but better … somehow. And in that “somehow” lies the rub: all evidence suggests that Trump supporters consider their candidate perfect, or nearly so — and it’s hard to improve on perfection. So Haley is left searching for the magic formula, the key that will peel away enough of Donald Trump’s supporters to get her the nomination. In the heat of the moment, in Berlin, New Hampshire, Haley decided that saying the word “slavery” would cause the magic formula to be lost to her forever. What Haley, along with the rest of us, needs to grapple with is that maybe the magic formula doesn’t exist at all.