The party that ended slavery now struggles to criticize it

Nikki Haley's inabilty to blame slavery for the Civil War is ominous. A woman of color is appeasing racists to remain relevant.

Nikki Haley made a bold decision after a white supremacist gunned down nine African American churchgoers at Emanuel AME Church. She agreed to take down the Confederate flag flying on South Carolina’s statehouse grounds.

“We are not going to allow this symbol to divide us any longer,” she said at a press conference surrounded by Republican lawmakers. “The fact that people are choosing to use it as a sign of hate is something that we cannot stand.”

It broke with an earlier compromise to remove the flag from atop the building but to require a supermajority of the legislature to make any future changes. And it broke with South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who insisted that the flag revered by the shooter was not to blame for the murders.

In 2015, Haley suddenly had national star power. Two years later, she would become the US Ambassador to the United Nations with an eye to an eventual White House run.

However, when she published her book and appeared on Glenn Beck’s podcast in 2019, Haley seemed to have regrets. She defended the Confederate flag and blamed the shooter for desecrating it.

And here is this guy that comes out with his manifesto, holding the Confederate flag, and had just hijacked everything that people thought of. We don't have hateful people in South Carolina. There's always the small minority that's always going to be there. But people saw it as service and sacrifice and heritage. But once he did that, there was there was no way to overcome it. And the national media came in in droves. They wanted to define what happened. They wanted to make this about racism.

When was the Confederacy not about racism? Haley took her act of moral courage and turned it into cowardice. Her backtracking went viral.

Haley didn’t help matters when she wrote an opinion piece doubling down on her defense of the flag. She said she could only remove the flag by simultaneously honoring it and appeasing those who revered it.

Today’s outrage culture does not allow any gestures to the other side. It demands that we declare winners and losers. That attitude comes at a big price. Sadly, I’m not sure that in today’s political climate we would have been able to remove the flag.

There are a small number of hardened white supremacist racists who proclaim the flag as their symbol. The Charleston killer was among them. I will never understand the dark hatred that fills those people’s hearts.

But there’s also another group of people. It’s a group that today’s outrage culture wants to either deny exists or to condemn in the harshest terms. These are people who do not see the Confederate battle flag in racial terms. While I don’t agree with their view of the flag, I respect them.

The very-fine-people-on-both-sides logic baffled even the co-hosts of The View.

“She's talking out of two sides of her mouth,” said Joy Behar.

Sunny Hostin added:

“I actually think that it’s disqualifying for her to run for national office now that she’s made this statement…  South Carolina actually in - I believe it was 1860 - became the first state to commit treason by officially declaring that its citizens didn't want to be part of the United States if it meant they couldn't treat black people as property. The first state to commit treason. And nowhere in that declaration did they mention sacrifice.”

This week, Haley made matters far worse. At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, she was innocently asked what caused the Civil War. Haley froze. She turned her back, took a few steps, and sighed. “Well, don’t come with an easy question,” she said.

It was, in fact, a very easy question. But Haley had already made it clear that she felt compelled to honor anyone who misguidedly saw the Confederacy as an honorable cause. This time, it was even to the point of erasing slavery from the narrative.

She tried to dodge the question with gibberish.

“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. 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.

Even when goaded by the questioner to address slavery, Haley couldn’t do it. “What do you want me to say about slavery?”

The next day, Haley tried to explain herself but only made things worse by refusing to acknowledge that she made a mistake.

This is an important story because Nikki Haley is a serious presidential candidate. She’s the only Republican viewed as somewhat moderate who has any chance of competing with Donald Trump - no matter how remote. (The latest American Research Group poll has her trailing Trump in New Hampshire by only four points: 33% to 29%.)  Her name is frequently touted as Trump’s potential running mate.

Her inability to denounce white supremacy and even to acknowledge that slavery was at the root of the Civil War shows how viable Republican candidates now are willing to tolerate racism. When Trump echoed the words of Adolf Hitler by saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Haley - the daughter of Indian immigrants – responded tepidly with, “That rhetoric is not helpful.

Another prominent candidate, Ron DeSantis, has gone so far as to rewrite classroom instructions to say that slavery offered job-development skills. And he banned teaching AP African American history.

The former party of Abraham Lincoln has evolved over the past 160 years from freeing the enslaved to coddling those who romanticize the Confederacy.

The migration of black voters to the Democratic Party began a century ago. By 1936, black voters swung heavily for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Richard Nixon successfully plotted to capture the white supremacy vote in the South.

More recently, the Republican Party has refused to vote for a new Voting Rights Act to fix problems that led the Supreme Court to declare a crucial part of it unconstitutional. In previous years, that act was reauthorized with overwhelming bipartisan support.

But now, we are witnessing one candidate echoing Hitler and another unable to denounce racism. Despite what Haley says, there are winners and losers when it comes to the history of racism in the United States. The South lost. Slavery was abolished. Even Jim Crow was eventually weakened, if not defeated.

What she and other Republicans are doing today is whitewashing history and welcoming racists to vote for them. It will take a new generation of leadership within the Republican Party to undo this damage.