GOP candidates ignore history to court support of white supremacists

Friday, Dec. 29, 2023 | 2 a.m.

It’s been nearly 163 years since the first shots of the Civil War were fired, yet Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley has yet to learn that the primary cause of the war was slavery. Plain and simple.

On Wednesday night at an event in New Hampshire, Haley did not cite slavery as a cause of the American Civil War. Instead, she argued that the catalysts for the war were “basically how the government was going to run” and “freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

Yes, individual and states’ rights to freedom, self-governance and secession were important topics at the time of the Civil War. But it is disgraceful to discuss these topics without noting that the primary freedom that southern plantation owners were fighting for was the freedom to purchase, own and subjugate other human beings, upon which the southern economy relied.

The southern states wanted to govern the slave trade as they saw fit and when a majority of the American people exercised their rights at the ballot box to elect President Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina and 10 other states tried to secede from their pledge of allegiance to the United States of America. They seceded because Lincoln represented the possibility that the great sin of slavery might finally come to an end and the Black population, which had long outnumbered the white population in the South, might finally be counted as fully equal for the purposes of political representation, ending the Three-Fifths Compromise.

This history isn’t complicated or contentious, except for modern white supremacists who seek to ignore our history.

Kansas “bled” for nearly a decade before the Civil War began, as hundreds of American abolitionists were murdered over a proposal that would have made that territory a non-slave state, and South Carolina’s own declaration of secession cited “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery.”

We refuse to believe that Haley, who grew up in South Carolina and was raised by a father who was a professor at a historically Black college, is unaware of this history. We refuse to believe that Haley was ignorant of these facts when she served as governor of South Carolina and was shamed into removing a Confederate flag that once flew above the statehouse following the massacre of nine Black congregants at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

But if she isn’t ignorant, then Haley must have felt compelled to deny history and distort facts because she knows that too many of her followers might reject her if she owned up to America’s disturbing past. She must know that the Republican Party as an institution is rotten at its core and can’t handle the true history of slavery in America.

It’s a rational conclusion.

Republicans have spent years arguing that honest discussions about our racial past or present are more harmful to white children than bullets fired in school classrooms. They’ve passed laws banning basic instruction in the history of racism in the United States and made bald-faced lies about the lessons contained in curriculum that touches on issues of diversity, equity or inclusion, and made wild claims about attacks on white culture.

Haley’s closest contender for first runner-up in the Republican presidential primary is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who successfully fought to teach schoolchildren that Black people “benefited” from slavery and learned “valuable skills.” He also banned instruction or discussion of how the legacy of slavery affects Black people today and rejected AP African American history curriculum approved by American history experts from all political stripes.

DeSantis’ racist policies echo rhetoric of the leading candidate for the GOP nomination for president, Donald Trump. Trump has enjoyed the unwavering support of his MAGA minions even after inviting known neo-Nazis to dine with him at his home, said that “Laziness is a trait in blacks” and defended the murderous torch-wielding white supremacists that marched in Charlottesville, Va., as “very fine people.”

The entire Republican presidential field has made statements and supported policies that are nothing short of disgusting and shameful, targeting marginalized Americans with policy proposals that would be more at home in the 19th century than in the 21st.

Unfortunately, when given the opportunity to stand out from the crowd and demonstrate courageous leadership by speaking truth to what are irrefutable facts about our nation’s history, Haley chose instead to behave like Trump and avoid the retribution of her base by engaging in manipulative and cowardly lies.

Her tap-dancing “clarification” a day later was too little and too late.Comically, she also complained the questioner was a “political plant,” as if that made a difference on such a simple question.

Haley’s campaign has surged in recent weeks and may now pose a legitimate threat to Trump. We believe that she remains the only viable GOP candidate who does not pose a direct threat to democracy itself. But her actions this week reveal that while she may be the best Republican candidate in the field, she is nothing more than the least rotten fish in a very stinky and slimy Republican barrel.