Over at National Review, Jeffrey Blehar tells us that Nikki Haley's real gaffe last night wasn't racism or something racism adjacent. Oh no:
The real gaffe Haley committed on Wednesday was that, when she froze up under an unpredicted question and defaulted to her factory settings in answering, those answers demonstrated such contempt for the intelligence of her voters. We can be told the Civil War was about slavery, Nikki — we’re all adults here.... That’s why this little gaffe, however minor, memorably reveals something about Haley; we rarely get such accidental insight into how little politicians think of their own voters.
Uh huh. Haley's real problem was not realizing how enlightened modern Republicans are about issues of race. Color me skeptical. Consider this news item from 2015:
The division over what children should learn in school is clear in Texas, where academic standards list slavery third among the causes of the war, after sectionalism and states’ rights — written deliberately in that order to telegraph what some elected Texas officials described as slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict.
Slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” said Pat Hardy, a Republican member of the State Board of Education, when the board adopted the standards in 2010. “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”
In a poll that same year, only 49% of Republicans agreed that slavery was the main reason for the Civil War.¹ Nearly half of Republicans say it would be bad to pay more attention to the history of slavery and racism. 73% of Republicans say anti-white bias is as big a problem as anti-Black bias—a number that's increased steadily for the past decade. 82% of Republicans oppose Black Lives Matter and 76% oppose even nonviolent protests against Black deaths. Only 6% of Republicans believe statues of Confederate leaders should be taken down. In Congress, two years ago, Republicans voted 2:1 not to remove statues of Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders from the US Capitol.
I think Haley was keenly aware of what the Republican base wanted to hear from her. She didn't misjudge either her voters or their intelligence. She just forgot that these days they'd mostly shrug and figure she had mentioned slavery because everyone has to toe the PC line in public. It's a damn shame, but what can you do? The wink and nod are understood.
Believe it or not, though, some good news has come out of all this. You may recall that Donald Trump was asked a few years ago about the roots of the Civil War and produced this deathless answer:
People don’t realize, you know, the civil war — if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there a civil war? Why could that one not have been worked out?
Today, however, Trump's MAGA PAC slammed Haley because she "was unable to say that the Civil War was about slavery." That's progress! Trump now knows what the Civil War was about.
¹In fairness, Democrats didn't do that much better (62% agreed). And in a more recent poll only 70% of Americans could even identify the North as the winner. So maybe the real issue here is just that we're all idiots.
"the real issue here is just that we're all idiots."
Very ignorant idiots with very compartmentalised minds, perhaps ?
i haven't been in a classroom in more than a few decades, but the problem, if i had to guess, is we badly teach history in general and the civil war in particular.
That is entirely by design.
No.
This concludes another exciting episode of short answers to simple errors. Tune in later for another exciting episode.
PARENTS want history to focus on facts, as if memorizing a catalogue of 10 facts (or 100, or 1000) is all that is required to understand history. That, and the idea that you can always hire a football coach, basketball coach, swim team coach as a history or social studies teacher, means that basic history education is substandard. AP and IB classes are a different story.
We badly teach a great many things and that's why we're both ignorant and mentally compartmentalised. For instance, about teaching mathematics it has been reasonably stated that for those going on to use mathematics professionally (including the very few who will truly be mathematicians) then the mathematics taught in school is too little, too late. For everyone else, it's too much too soon. Just note how appalling most people are with understanding fairly basic statistics.
But in truth human knowledge is now so great that just about everything is taught 'too little too late'. And that's without wasting even a moment's time on the 'transrationalisms'.
Trump doesn't know what the Civil War was about. Trump knows that when you smell blood in the water, that's the time to attack.
Interestingly, Republican responses to Haley's gibberish have fallen into two quite different themes:
- Trump cultists: "Birdbrain is dumb as a bag of hammers. Of course it was about slavery!"
- The rest: "Haley was correct. The war was fought because states' rights blah blah blah."
But none that I have seen picked up her inane babbling that the war was "about the freedoms of every individual".
I was not paying much attention to this usual internal GOP civilwarring, but I have to say when I heard a clip of Haley saying that nonsense "about the freedomes of every individual" I practically spit out my chardonnay.
States' right to do what? Oh yeah . . . .
In case there is any doubt, here is the full text of the South Carolina ordinance of secession. Aside from historical throat clearing, it is slavery all the way down.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
The Texas version is a knockout punch too.
Without rechecked due to having only my cellphone, not laptop, now, the CSA' s secession document makes it clear that slavery was the issue, as did most of those of the eleven states, as I recall.
But the fact is that Tejsns took the land from Mexico because they refused to hive it their slaves.
Several different states wrote statements of causes for secession. There was no single secession document. But, yes, a heat map will show that slavery was far and away the main issue.
The problem wasn't that Texas refused to give land to slaves. It's that they were allowed to settle on the condition that they abandon slavery and learn Spanish, and they did neither. In fact, the number of slaves in Texas increased by more than two orders of magnitude in the twenty years before they went to war.
Exactement ! It's in the writing of their own mythic heros and still the Deniers wave their battle flags shouting heritage.
There's no question slavery was the reason for the Confederacy's formation and existence and in it's existence and belief in itself as a independent nation it launched an attack on U.S, military installation which caused the war. The South could have tried to negotiate for evacuation of Ft. Sumter and other sea-borne Federal forts without firing a shot. As Lincoln himself said "In your hands my disatisfied countrymen lies the possibility of civil war. We must not be enemies." Ergo he was not pressuring the situation, Jefferson Davis was by insisting the South prove itself to be independent by attacking Ft. Sumter. It was tragic and destructive miscalculation for what this action did was rally the entire North to the cause of war even though four states joined the Confederacy afterward.
However, we cannot leave the North off the hook as a far as slavery for there were slaves states that stuck by the Union (Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware and Maryland) and did not join with the Confederacy after Ft. Sumter. Northern war aims at first were to simply reunite the country, not end slavery. Even the vaunted Emancipation Proclamation one could say was partially ridiculous because it did not free the slaves in the U.S, only the Confederacy in territory not under the government's control. It eventually became a war to end slavery because it had to be. The reality of the situation on the ground and moral efficacy of the U.S.'s cause determined that would be so. It was inevitable, really, that the war be fought over slavery because there would not have been a war in the first place without it.
This is what Nikki Haley could have said the other night. She could have pointed out that she took down the flag of treason from her statehouse when she was governor. And the fact that she didn't, for the reasons Kevin mentioned, because there are many Republicans still committed to that cause, made her look weak, foolish and stupid. Whatever momentum she may have had as an alternative to Trump pretty much has died because the reality is she is not a terribly bright or strong leader, especially when you throw away your strengths in the name of political expiediency. That's not leadership. She's benefitted only because she been cautious when it came to Trump, plus a lot of other topics and quite frankly a better campaigner than the other ones not named Trump. But when the truth came to look for her, she was nowhere to be found and that's not the kind of reaction which is going to elect anyone, let alone her.
It wasn't about states rights in any case. The fugitive slave act was an attack on states rights, and South Carolina complained bitterly about the actions taken by northern states.
The people who vote for Republicans are the population who have collective responsibility for all things wrong with all things.
They haven't been forced into it by circumstances, when they vote for Donald Trump, that's who they are. Their choice, their responsibility, their utter failure, because we live in a democracy.
And because we live in a democracy it's easy to see whose fault it is, which is why the people who vote for Republicans are always so eager to find someone else they can blame for anything because it's really always them.
This is a weird genre of apologia. The NR seems to do it a fair amount - the goal, of course, it to pretend Republicans aren't what they constantly demonstrate themselves to be. Which, fine, PR cleanup on isle 5.
What makes it so odd is that it has to be couched in whiny indignity, I think because their consumers have been trained to play victim to every perceived slight. They literally have no other responsive mode, so the have to insist they're being victimized somehow, even by their own toy
entertainerscandidates.They really need a new trick. Weaponized xian whiners are so 90s.
“And in a more recent poll only 70% of Americans could even identify the North as the winner.”
I mean, yes, the North won in 1865… won the right to pay for everything in the South in the 20th and 21st centuries, all while steadily losing influence over anything Congress or the White House does. Feels more pyrrhic by the day. (This is not to minimize the moral importance of freeing the slaves. But the North likely would be better off today if it didn’t have the South undermining everything it would like to do.)
Lincoln, who was not weighed down by any southerners in the Senate, was a very progressive president. He established land grant colleges, cross country railroads, the Veterans Administration, multiple constitutional amendments, and the obvious civil rights progress among other progressive programs.
As you note in passing (it wasn't just the Senate but the House also), Congress was able to pass all these things because it didn't have any Southerners to vote them down - or, in the case of the railroad, insist on a southern route.
That's why all the southern whining about the Morrill Tariff is so strange. The only reason the tariff passed the Senate is that SEVEN southern states had already seceded at that point, leaving control of the Senate to Republicans. Here's the timeline:
- Dec 20, 1860: South Carolina secedes
- Jan 9, 1861: Mississippi secedes,
- Jan 10, 1861: Florida secedes,
- Jan 11, 1861: Alabama secedes,
- Jan 19, 1861: Georgia secedes,
- Jan 26, 1861: Louisiana secedes,
- Feb 1, 1861: Texas secedes
- March 2, 1861: Morrill tariff adopted
Yes, the North won a military victory in 1865, but the South won a political victory in 1877 that largely reversed the fruits of this victory.
A number of years ago someone “here” led me to this article, and ever since I have questioned who really won the Civil War:
https://weeklysift.com/2014/08/11/not-a-tea-party-a-confederate-party/
The Tea Party morphed into the Trump Party, otherwise it’s the same thing.
I bet it was Ars Gratis Artis.
Yeah, I was wondering what Kevin meant by "win" too.
At least the Confederate statue in Arlington was moved out.
The "United States of America" was the one who won the war. This "North/South" crap obscures the fact that the seceding states were committing treason against their country.
Thank you!
Trump off the ballot in Maine next year,
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67837639
The sad truth is that the South won a pyrrhic victory by ending Reconstruction. They lag behind the rest of the country by any measure of human thriving.
And would still be even more of a third world country without New Deal programs, including the TVA.
I have 2 elderly uncles in Texas. Cant talk about the civil war, slavery or the civil rights movement. This culture war battle is still red hot.
I'm going to push back agains the "we're all idiots", partly because I am not an idiot nor are most of the people with whom I surround myself, but also because I want to distinguish "being an idiot" from ignorance. I am not using Ignorance as a pejorative here, I simply mean "a lack of knowledge or information". We, even the non-idiots among us, are ignorant of a great many things, and it is pretty clear that a lot of American History is about things of which we are ignorant.
And its not just what we are taught in K-12, its how we are taught. I think it is pretty standard, or it was when several generations of us were in school, to teach "history" as a series of dates and events, rather than as narratives about the meanings, causes, impacts, and interpretations of those events.
History education is focused on "facts", and not on critical anaysis or evaluation of that information. There are, I am positive, many exceptions to this but I would be very surprised if they were not confined to honors programs in elite private schools and public schools in very white affluent areas.
My high school history teacher, in Massachusetts in the early 80's, told us that "the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery". He said that on several occasions. And of course he created a narrative, using dates and events, that made that case. He was popular and funny I didn't really question that until I figured out about halfway through junior year that he was not every smart, when I asked a few questions not to challenge at all but just because I was curious. Anyway, then I started thinking about what I learned in second grade, and then I asked my father a few questions and came to understand that while there were multiple factors that led to the Civil War after Lincoln's election, it's absolutely preposterous to say that "the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery". Dude was on a mission to spread radical right wingnuttery.
That's just one example, and I am sure that most history teachers are no where near as bad as this dirtbag was. But you know, it is emotionally disruptive for white people to question the dominant narrative of American History, so we don't do it and we get all existentially terrorized when someone tries to do it.
Even in our well-meaning moments, we create things like "Black History" and "Women's History" and "Indigenous People's History", as if these things are separate from, and must be as an appendage of, American History. We can not confront the truth of the brutality of our history. Very few are helping us do this, and those who do are quickly punished.
I started first grade in 1959 and through grade school I also learned that the Civil War was fought over the principle of states' rights and attributing its cause to slavery was simplistic. And I didn't learn this from some nut job pushing a right wing agenda, but from liberal, largely Jewish, women teachers in Brooklyn, NY. They taught us that the civil rights movement was a noble cause (we learned all about James Meredith who was revered as a hero) and we sang Blowin' in the Wind and Pete Seeger songs in assembly. But so total and pervasive was the white racist South's victory over Reconstruction that these same teachers (as well as our textbooks) parroted lies straight out of Gone With the Wind.
Your instructor should have been asked why the New Engkand Emigrant Aid Society found It necessary to srbd Beecher's Bibles to Kansans.
Amazing that Massachusetts has anyone taking his stance.
I was in high school about a decade earlier, in New York. My first memory of learning about the Civil War was in (about) 7th grade, however. We had a debate in class on the primary cause of the war. I was assigned the "states' rights" side. Another student, the "slavery" side. I suppose the purpose of the debate was give the class more to think about in understanding what was going on in the country at the time. Because the default assumption for every single one of us was that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. I remember going to the library on weekends and writing quotations from Lincoln and Confederate leaders and historians on index cards. There was plenty of material to pick from for either side of the debate, and when I presented the states' rights side, I did fine, as I recall. But I'm pretty sure that after the debate, I was no different than anyone else in class in believing that slavery was still the primary cause of the war. I don't think we had to be taught that to understand it. It was overwhelmingly the case. A self-evident truth, so to speak.
We were all white American kids. It was not "emotionally disruptive" for us to learn about slavery. It was not particularly difficult to "confront the truth of the brutality of our history." That's all poppycock, the assumption that kids in school were snowflakes wrapped up in some mythic idealism about white identity. Hell, most of the villains we learned about in history (from Nero to Hitler) were white, so what if Southern slaveholders were white too. It all happened more than a hundred years before. Many kids didn't have roots in this country that far back anyway, and if we identified with an ethnic community, it wasn't "white" but probably Irish or Italian or German, and so on.
(I realize there's a tendency in progressive circles to divide everyone now into two groups, the whites and people of color. We should resist that. It robs us of our heritage, which for most white people was a life outside the gates of the WASP establishment. The idea of "white privilege" was hardly the reality for generations of immigrant families, even if they were lucky not to be enslaved.)
I grew up in the North. I realize things are different in the South. But anyone feeling butthurt today over the loss of a society founded on an evil institution of the past is just a snowflake. Any politicians catering to those snowflakes should be disqualified from office.
I will venture that your experience of learning about slavery not being emotionally disruptive, and that was my personal experience also, is the result growing up in the northern states where large parts of the population were decendents of folks who immigrated in the late 1800s. So it was easy for us to see slavery as this terrible thing that other people did to black people. We and ours were not part of that group.
That was certainly how I felt well into my 20s, maybe even 30s. My ancestors never enslaved anyone! My ancestors were poor farm workers in Italy when slavery was permitted in the US! Not me!
But that breaks down as one becomes more committed to truly understanding not only slavery, but its legacy.
It IS disruptive. Why do you think we refuse to do it?
But we have to do it.
"I want to distinguish 'being an idiot' from ignorance."
I want to distinguish ignorance from unconstrained ignorance.
The cause of ignorance is that you don't know what you don't know. The cause of unconstrained ignorance is you forgot that you don't know everything, and then you paint yourself into a corner, and then you find an excuse so you don't have to acknowledge that you're the idiot.
Who constrains ignorance? For the child, it is the wise adult. For the apprentice, it is the wise master. Otherwise, it is me, myself, and I. So, no excuses Nikki!!
Wait, am I excusing Nikk? I wasnt aware.
I sometimes think the founding tome of the United States was "How I Became a Multi-Billionaire Through Wage Theft in My Spare Time and You can Too!" The Yankee Inventor was grafted on much later.
It is possible to assert that notwithstanding victory on the battlefield, the North did not win the war -- Jim Crow. And remember that the North was forced to stop enforcing Reconstruction and had to withdraw its troops. Somehow I doubt Republicans would make that argument.
It's not a lie, exactly, to say that the Civil War was about states' rights. It was about states' rights to keep slavery. (Actually, initially it was about the rights to have slavery in the territories. The Republicans had no initial intention to ban it in the states; they hoped that it would wither away. This panicked the Southerners because they figured banning slavery in the territories would lead to it withering away in the states.)
At the time, the Southerners framed the conflict as about states' rights because that was their justification for slavery. Today, however, the term "states' rights" is being used as a fig-leaf to cover the fact that slavery was the right that the states wanted. And that's why the claim is fundamentally untrue.
The proximate cause of the Civil War was not some principle of states' rights, it was Lincoln's pledge that new states would be admitted as non-slave by default, although they could later vote to allow slavery. Lincoln did not promise to abolish slavery or take away any rights that states had at the time. But the South could see that this would lead to loss of their control of the slavery issue in Congress and presumably to ultimate banning of slavery. As long as states were admitted on a balanced basis - for example California vs Texas - slavery could continue. That pledge was the last straw. It was power politics in defense of slavery.
"Today, however, Trump's MAGA PAC slammed Haley because she "was unable to say that the Civil War was about slavery." That's progress! Trump now knows what the Civil War was about."
It was the PAC that published it, not Trump himself. He probably still knows nothing about it, because he doesn't care at all about it (and about history (and about anything except himself)).
I'm intrigued that so few Americans - none in fact that I've actually seen, but I assume there must be some - make the distinction between the reasons states seceded and the reasons war broke out. Slavery was self-evidently the former, but war could have been avoided if the North in general and Lincoln in particular had elected to accept the secessions as a fait accompli, withdrawn federal troops from the rebel states, and get on with building a modern, prosperous, industrialised United States. Indeed there are good reasons for believing today's Americans, both liberal and reactionary, would be happier if he'd done just that.
Arguing that war broke out because Lincoln did not move quickly enough to accept what he regarded as an illegal secession is a very strange argument. By the time Lincoln won election, he had been clear on his goal of preserving the Union for more than two years. The idea that Lincoln was somehow responsible for seven states seceding before he even took office, that James Buchanan's attempt to keep southern military installations in Union hands was Lincoln's fault, and that Lincoln "failed" to immediately withdraw Union troops from Union military installations in the South when southerners would not allow that... and that somehow this is what caused the conflict is beyond bizarre.
To show just how ingrained the idea that saying slavery was the cause of the Civil War is, look for the Simpsons episode from season 3 or 4 when Apu is applying for US citizenship. One of the questions he is asked is "what was the cause of the Civil War." Apu starts giving a nuanced answer about trade and other mumbo jumbo and the person asking the question says "just say 'Slavery'".
The gag is that the immigrant has a deeper knowledge of US history that regular dumbass Americans who think that the war was about slavery.
Slavery WAS the cause of the Civil War. Trade was not. If anything Apu was following a sort of 1920-1950s Lost Cause/Dunning School explanation of the Civil War and Reconstruction.