Another Culture War Republican: Critiques of Nikki Haley

Several days ago, former South Carolina governor and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N, Nikki Haley, announced her run for the office of President. In analyzing her current campaign messages and policy promises, it’s pretty clear she’s an example of the new post-Trump example of what an American Conservative believes.

Photo by Robert F. Bukaty/AP

For those of you who don’t know, Nikki Haley has spent much of her life in public service, whether in Congress, as Governor of South Carolina, or as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. during the Trump administration. Throughout her career, she has cast herself as a constitutional Republican, endorsing first Marco Rubio and later Ted Cruz in 2016 before eventually falling behind Trump.

She has also shown hesitation in tackling the issue of systemic racism, which plagues our nation, something she has claimed to be a victim of, until she was forced to act. An example of this was that during her governorship of South Carolina, there was a movement to remove the Confederate flag located on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse. She actively pushed back against these efforts until a shooter entered a historically black church in Charleston and murdered 9 of its members. Only after murder did she relent and push for the flag to be removed.

Now, as it looks like the Republican party will have a new leadership struggle in their eventual primaries in 2024, it appears Haley has fully turned from a Bush-era constitutional conservative to a post-Trump conservative, confirming that the mold in which the conservative establishment is now more in tune with the likes of Brian Kemp and Ron DeSantis than it is with Donald Trump.

This new American conservatism is important to distinguish from Trumpist populism, as it results from a Hegelian dialectic between Bush-era neo-conservatism and Trumpist-Populism, a synthesis of the two concepts. It is willing to tap into right-wing populism and even Fascist movements and ideas, but to reduce it solely to those terms is a mistake.

A primary and scary example of this new post-Trump conservatism policy agenda is its doubling down on the culture war. A major theme of the conservative agenda these past few years has been the demonization of the LGBTQ community, specifically the trans community, with accusations of grooming and pedophilia being common within conservative circles.

Acts like the Don’t Say Gay bill in Florida have spawned dozens of carbon copy clones in other conservative-oriented states such as Indiana and Utah. Accusations of litter boxes making their way into public schools (an effort to portray trans children as mentally ill or spoiled) have even made their way into the Minnesota legislature.

Nikki Haley herself, while in Exeter, N.H, has claimed that Florida’s Don’t Say Gay act didn’t go far enough “Basically, what is said was you shouldn’t be able to talk about gender before third grade…I’m sorry, I don’t think that goes far enough”. She has expressed interest in banning the discussion of gender in all elementary grade school levels.

Another issue that has been a concern amongst conservatives has been the high rates of undocumented immigration present at the Southern U.S. border. The massive rates of immigration we have seen is an issue that needs both strong domestic policies (ensuring these people who are coming here for whatever reason are being cared for) and solid foreign policy (helping to alleviate the domestic problems of those countries which are the stem of much of this emigration).

But what we’ve seen from many of the conservative states receiving many of these immigrants is more culture war politics, exemplified when Ron DeSantis transported undocumented immigrants from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard in an attempt to show “the Libs what we’ve been dealing with.”

And then there’s the negative conservative reaction around our history of race in America. Contemporary conservatives in places like Florida have actively removed and stripped what little black history exists within the public school system. No doubt other states will follow in their example.

From her time as governor to her Presidential campaign speech, Haley has expressed dissatisfaction with movements and ideas that seek to explore and address America’s racial wounds. Positioning her argument as ignoring differences and seeing similarities is a position that makes no room for efforts like the 1619 project.

Suppose Haley was in control of what our kids learn in history courses. In that case, they’d never know why Jamestown began importing slaves in the first place, or of the post-Reconstruction usage of convict-leasing and debt peonage as a way to re-enslave black people, or of the Black Panther Party. Our objective as Americans is not to ignore history but to address it with full confidence, and due to the culture war, Haley is unwilling to do that.

Using the culture war to this extreme is distracting and dangerous. One, it prevents us as Americans from dealing with political problems; we are made to argue with ourselves over petty cultural issues that don’t matter.

And two, the application of this technique has an appeal for the Trumpist wing of the Republican party, specifically the ones who engage in acts of domestic terrorism. As a result of the demonization of drag shows, we've seen far-right Americans attacking power stations to force the shows to stop.

And I don’t doubt that if Nikki Haley won the Presidency, she’d engage in the same kind of culture war rhetoric. Still, unlike her former boss Trump, she would be willing to back down when bashing minorities becomes too problematic for her public image when an inevitable terrorist attack kills the people she’s using as a scapegoat.

Compared to other options within her party, Haley is not the worst option. But for America, she's absolutely not the best.