Nikki Haley and the Monster That Ate Republicanism

Nikki Haley is a good person. Pity she got mixed up with that Republican party. And, like so many, couldn’t summon the moral clarity to get out. So now she’s trying to run for president as a woman in a misogynist party, a person of color in a white nationalist party, a child of immigrants in a xenophobic party.

Actually, they do sometimes support such candidates, just so they can pretend to themselves they’re not really misogynist, racist xenophobes.

But meanwhile Haley’s been bedeviled by the fundamental problem of running against Trump in the Trump cult party. Her basic line’s been, “Too bad he can’t win.” Avoiding actually articulating it’s because he’s a stinker.

It all came to roost for Haley when asked a seemingly innocuous question about the Civil War’s cause. She burbled some pablum that it was about “how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could or couldn’t do.” Like, um, own slaves? What she couldn’t do was let the word slavery cross her lips.

After that caused an uproar, she did try to walk it back, but the damage to her candidacy is probably fatal. Remember, it’s only Trump who could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and lose no votes.

Meantime I was reminded of Haley’s speech at the last GOP national convention, when she spoke of how, as governor, she’d removed from South Carolina government buildings a symbol of hate. While bizarrely refusing to name it: the Confederate flag.

Both instances were efforts to avoid riling the Republican party’s white nationalist base. They love the Confederate flag, and wouldn’t cotton to hearing it explicitly besmirched. They claim it stands for pride in heritage, or some such folderol, with a sly wink because they know what it really stands for: keeping Blacks down. They also indulge in the “lost cause” mythology, painting the Civil War as a noble battle for “state rights” and “freedom” (which Haley seemed to endorse; or even calling it “the War of Northern Aggression”). Some may succeed in thusly deluding themselves there’s no racism to see there. While in reality white supremacy is central. Otherwise the whole thing would have been long forgotten.

An honest Haley should have called that out. Confederates were indeed fighting for freedom . . . to deprive Blacks of it. Her evasiveness regarding that speaks loudly about the prevailing Republican ethos. Haley’s trying to get them to vote for her in lieu of Trump is a fool’s errand, on a ship of fools.