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Imagine this: in the 1830s, the U.S. government spent the equivalent of what today would be a trillion dollars to expel just about every last indigenous person -- man, woman, and child -- from their homelands in this country's south and southeast. As historian Claudio Saunt so vividly reminds us in Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, they were forcibly sent west of the Mississippi River (mainly to today's Oklahoma) on what came to be known as the "trail of tears." And the lands that had once been theirs were then almost singularly transformed into part of a southern empire of slavery, devoted to raising cotton (nearly 160 million pounds of it annually on those formerly indigenous lands by 1850). It was one of the major acts of appropriation -- of theft, to be clearer -- in history and part of the grim story of the formation of what would in February 1861 become the Confederacy.
And that, in turn, is just part of what the Confederate flag that, until 2015, flew over the capitol of then-Governor Nikki Haley's South Carolina stood for and could someday, as TomDispatch regular Clarence Lusane, author of the not-to-be-missed book Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy, reminds us today, fly over" well, the White House. Yes, it sounds beyond extreme, but face it, we're living in an increasingly extreme land. If just about any version of the Trumpublican Party were to win again in 2024 -- and don't for a second rule it out -- we could find ourselves in a modern version of the Confederacy.
With that in mind, let Lusane take you into the bizarre extremity of the MAGA (and diet-MAGA) Republican world that could someday, if things go truly badly, be the world for all of us. Tom
Make Republicans Great Again?
Nikki Haley's Diet-MAGA Problem
In 2015, according to the talking points being floated by former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley and her team, she alone heroically removed the Confederate flag that flew on the grounds of the state capitol and so healed racial wounds. She implied as much right after it happened, again at the 2020 Republican National Convention, and in subsequent interviews. This "achievement" remains a critical part of her story about why she aspires to become president. Given the weakness of the South Carolina governorship, Haley doesn't have a lot to show for her time in office or, for that matter, defending President Donald Trump as his ambassador at the United Nations.
Still, even her claim to that is problematic on multiple levels. First, she and other state Republicans like Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott had ignored decades of resistance to that flag by African Americans and their local allies. And unlike Haley and crew, those protesters, of course, never bought into the "Lost Cause" rhetoric of the Confederacy, the historical revisionism filled with intentional mythology that has long suggested the stars and bars are nothing but a benign neutral symbol of "our" past.
Haley bought into that very tale when she claimed that flag symbolized "service, sacrifice, and heritage" and was essentially devoid of harmful racist significance until "hijacked" by white supremacist murderer Dylann Roof in his mass shooting at a church in Charleston in 2015. In fact, scholars Spencer Piston and Logan Strother found that white southern support for the Confederate flag had long been associated with racist intolerance.
For African Americans and racial-justice advocates, it's always been painfully clear that the Confederate flag remained a white supremacist message the state's racial hierarchy sought to defend at all costs. That flag at the state capitol was installed in 1961, exactly 100 years after the start of the Civil War, as freedom riders, sit-ins, and civil rights rallies were steamrolling the white racial hegemony of southern life. It would enjoy a privileged position first atop the capitol itself and then on a flagpole adjacent to it for decades.
The horrific 2015 massacre of eight black worshipers and their parson at the legendary "Mother" Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by the Confederate flag-loving Roof, and the fearless action 10 days later by Bree Newsome, who climbed that flagpole and physically took down the stars and bars -- only to be arrested and see it raised again -- finally spurred Governor Haley and state officials to remove it. Deflecting blame for the racist symbolism of the flag onto Roof was a way of defending generations of white nationalist support for it, allowing Haley to claim hero status for its removal. Still, in 2023, it remains beyond disingenuous for her to eternally praise herself because "we" got rid of that flag.
An Ever More Extreme Republican Party
No less dishonest has been Haley's reshaping of her own record on the issue. As the PBS Newshour noted, "For years, Haley had resisted calls to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds, even casting a rival's push for its removal as a desperate stunt." Embarrassingly, CNN uncovered a 2010 interview in which she defended not just the flag, but Confederate History Month and the Lost Cause ideology that went with it.
In a recently surfaced interview with the Palmetto Patriots (a far-right group with links to brazen white nationalists), when asked about the controversy surrounding that flag, she responded, "I will work and talk to them about the heritage and how this is not something that is racist." She also supported "Confederate History Month," adding outrageously enough, "Yes, it's part of a traditional -- you know, it's part of tradition. And so, when you look at that, if you have the same as you have Black History Month and you have Confederate History Month and all of those." Equating Black History Month with Confederate History Month is not only contemptuous, but previews the kind of pandering, lowest-common-denominator politics a future Haley administration in Washington would undoubtedly embody.
No less problematic, one of those Palmetto Patriots interviewers she so happily chatted with was a virulent racist, Robert Slimp. He also had been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the white nationalist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the latter one of the groups that Roof claimed had inspired him through videos on its website of "black-on-white" crime. There is no record of Haley denouncing Slimp, though there is a record of her being forced to purge a member of her 2013 reelection steering committee who had ties to CCC.
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