The Extremely Depressing, Predictable Reason Nikki Haley Initially Said the Civil War Wasn't Caused by Slavery
Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley recently attracted all manner of bad press for answering a question about the cause of the Civil War with, “I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people couldn't do.”
This understandably frustrated the sizable portion of American public who know damn well that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. The Confederacy thought slavery was great and should extend to the Western territories. The Union felt otherwise.
On paper, it might seem strange, if not downright counter-intuitive, for a woman of color to neglect to mention slavery when discussing the root causes of what I and my fellow Southerners will always call The War of Northern Aggression.
Haley received so much pushback that she was forced to concede that “of course” slavery was the cause of the Civil War.
The Conservative playbook for the Civil War is identical to the Republican strategy for the whole January 6th kerfuffle. They steps are
It wasn’t such a big deal
Everybody was doing it
Actually, it was our enemies who were behind it. You might think that it’s awful and reflects terribly on us but actually it reflects terribly on the people we hate the most.
For January 6th that meant pretending that what was seen as a violent insurrection was nothing more than an unexpectedly rowdy tour of the Capitol from freedom-loving Americans interested in electoral integrity the same way all the GamerGate bros cared deeply about ethics in video game journalism.
Its other primary defense is that whatever happened at the Capitol (which, again, was no big deal) pales in comparison to the damage wrought by Black Lives Matters protestors.
In the Conservative mind thousands of people died horrible deaths and thousands of businesses were destroyed in the aftermath of the George Floyd tragedy and “Sleepy” Joe “Let’s Go Brandon” Biden gave the Presidential Medal of Honor to everyone arrested in the riots.
The final defense is that January 6th was nothing and what those horrible black people did was far worse but also the Q Shaman and all of the other Trump-loving lunatics were actually Antifa plants who purposefully caused as much destruction as possible in a shameful attempt to make the MAGA contingent seem extreme and unhinged and perhaps not the sanest folks in the world.
Conservatives disingenuously like to pretend that slavery actually worked out well for African-Americans and caucasians alike and wasn’t that bad.
They also like to point out that plenty of other countries condoned slavery, that the United States was not unique in that respect. The Conservative's final defense is that, actually, it was the Democrats who loved slavery and wanted it to continue forever and a towering, hat-loving Republican named Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves.
The great thing about that final argument is that in the ensuing one hundred and sixty nine years nothing has changed: the Democrats are still pro-slavery while Republicans think it’s bad.
Unfortunately the American exceptionalism practiced by Donald Trump and his cult insists that the United States has ALWAYS been a beacon of freedom, even during slavery.
It furthermore requires people who know damn well otherwise to pretend that the Civil War was about state rights, and people who wanted limited government against proponents of big government and telling people what to do.
That’s what Haley’s clumsy words about how the Civil War was fundamentally about “how government was going to run.” In this way of thinking the Confederacy just wanted to be able to make its own choices without big government interfering.
Haley is flattering the delicate sensibilities of racist white Southerners by presenting them as defenders of tradition and self-determination rather than bigots pining for a time when they could own human beings and work them to death if so inclined.
Despite what Haley would like to believe a whole lot has changed since 1865, thank God. The racial attitudes of the party have been reversed. The party of Lincoln has become the deeply racist Party of Trump.
That is the party whose nomination Haley is trying to win so she has to be delicate and political in how she talks about race but she didn’t have to be so transparently dishonest and calculating.
Besides I don’t think racists are going to vote for Haley anyway, simply because she’s not white. That’s all that matters to them and I can’t imagine them throwing their support behind Haley or Vivek Ramaswamy rather than a man who has made thinly veiled racism the rotten core of his odious brand.
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