Will she or won’t she?
With the Iowa Republican caucuses just days away on Jan. 15, there’s lots of interest in whether former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) will rack up enough support to finish a solid second to Donald Trump.
For those who once hoped Haley represented a more responsible faction of the Republican Party — and I put myself in that camp — that could have been an exciting possibility. Maybe she can go all the way and get the nomination. Maybe Republicans are ready for a fresher face. Maybe Haley offers a more moderate perspective than … some of the other candidates.
But we were set straight a few days ago in New Hampshire when Haley gave her now-infamous answer to a question about the cause of the Civil War. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, mention the word “slavery.” It was stunning. Even as she tried to walk back her remarks, the best she could do was to say she “had Black friends.” Or, she had them once — as a child.
We don’t know what she believes in her heart about slavery or the Civil War. But it almost doesn’t matter, because in New Hampshire she gave the answer she thought the Republican base wanted to hear. That speaks volumes not just about Haley but about the reactionary constituency that is now the foundation of the Republican Party.
This constituency is clamoring for a revisionist history of not just slavery and the Civil War, but the founding of our country, the Civil Rights movement, human contributions to climate change and more.
And it’s not being dished up just to grownups like Republican primary voters. It’s being force-fed to students via outfits like Prager U and Hillsdale College, which are distributing curricula for use in public schools in several states.
Prager U is “an educational vendor” for lessons taught to school students in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) Florida, where state law requires teaching that slavery wasn’t all bad because enslaved people learned valuable skills. In one of Prager U’s videos for schoolkids, a cartoon version of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass downplays slavery, calling it a “compromise” that benefited the early United States. Another one blasts climate “alarmism.”
Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, a public school district adopted Hillsdale College’s “1776 Curriculum.” That program was created in a furious backlash to the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which examined how racism and chattel slavery shaped our country. The 1776 Curriculum minimizes the history of slavery in the United States and leaves out key facts about the slave-holding founders of our country. It even argues that those same founders somehow had reasonable grounds for denying women the vote.
And then there are the crusaders for book-banning and censorship, led by Moms for Liberty. Haley, along with other Republican candidates, appeared at the Moms for Liberty national conference in Philadelphia last summer, and she spoke to the group again in September. Right now, Moms for Liberty looks like it might collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy. But right-wing politicians like Haley are poised to take up the mantle.
All of which is to say that Haley’s non-answer in New Hampshire was nothing if not a herald of what is to come if MAGA standard-bearers — not just Trump himself — win this year.
The right wants to continue the project of trying to rewrite history. It wants to continue trying to create a culture in which kids (and adults) know less, understand less and see the world through a narrow lens (generally straight, male, white European and Christian) when we know America is made up of a rich diversity of perspectives.
That view used to be the norm in this country. It has taken decades to make gradual progress toward a more inclusive culture, one where America’s pluralism is celebrated, not feared.
There are a lot of good reasons to reject the Republican agenda at the ballot box this year, but this has to be one of them: It’s an agenda that is bad for education, bad for kids and bad for adults if we want them to be part of a well-informed civil society.
We might have thought some standard-bearers for the party were more rational on this front than others. But it turns out they’re not.
Svante Myrick is president of People for the American Way.