Thursday, June 29, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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For the most part, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is trying to differentiate herself from Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary. But she sounded a lot like him this past weekend, oozing nostalgia for a glorious American past in which life was ostensibly better than it is right now.
“Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt?” Haley wrote in a tweet. “It was about faith, family, and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out.”
Simple? Easy? For whom?
Haley’s tweet is the kind of thing you’d expect to see from Trump or Ron DeSantis. But it’s particularly disappointing (though not surprising) coming from Haley, an Indian American daughter of immigrants raised in the South.
When Haley was growing up, life wasn’t so simple or easy. She’s said so herself. She has mentioned how she was once disqualified from a beauty pageant because they didn’t know whether to put her in the white category or the Black category. She has referenced the discrimination and hardship her family faced when she was young — discrimination that many families like hers still face now.
While she was governor, life wasn’t simple or easy for many people, either. The Confederate flag flew on the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol until 2015, when Haley signed legislation that finally removed it. That was, of course, only after a white supremacist gunned down nine Black people at a church in Charleston. That same year, Walter Scott, a Black South Carolinian, was killed by police during a traffic stop.
But according to Haley, the fact that she has even a chance of becoming president now is proof that racism and sexism are of the past.
“I was elected the first female minority governor in history,” Haley declared in a speech Saturday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual conference. “America isn’t racist. We’re blessed!”
Did it not occur to Haley that it shouldn’t have taken until 2011 for that to happen? Does she not think it is a problem that there have only been two other female minority governors in the 12 years since she was elected?
Maybe Haley is just looking for a political breakthrough. She is, after all, polling at a distant fourth place, even in her home state. And she certainly got that attention — though it probably wasn’t the kind she was looking for.
Haley’s tweet was met with an onslaught of backlash, and rightfully so. It received what people on Twitter call a “ratio” — when critiques of the tweet receive more positive attention than the tweet itself. The replies were flooded with stories from people who recalled what the “simple” times looked like for them — institutionalized racism, sky-high poverty rates, misogyny, antisemitism. Sure sounds easy, right?
But the “good old days” sentiment conveyed by Haley here is nothing new. It’s the kind of dog whistle that has been baked into the Republican Party’s brand for years, especially since Trump but certainly before him. Backlash to progress is what often prompts these politics of nostalgia — a lusting for a time when it was even easier to be a white man and even harder to be anyone else.
The problem with Haley’s tweet isn’t only that she’s ignoring the plight of Black Americans and LGBTQ+ Americans, immigrants and even women who were horribly oppressed back then, and generally still are. The tweet also was gallingly hypocritical. In order for her political ascension to be the trailblazing success story she rightfully claims it to be, she had to overcome something — and that something is being, as she has said, “different.” For as much as she laments the use of identity politics on the left, she’s used them plenty to form her own political brand.
The same woman who proudly declares herself the daughter of immigrants worked for one of the most blatantly racist and xenophobic presidents in modern history. Haley has proven herself to be someone who will say and do whatever is politically advantageous in the moment, even if it’s contradictory to the person she once claimed to be.
Paige Masten is a columnist for The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer.
