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Tuesday
The recent dodge by Nikki Haley on what caused the Civil War—she didn’t want to say “slavery” for fear of offending Trump supporters—had a familiar ring to it. In 1963-64 in my seventh grade Tennessee History class, our teacher told us that the causes were states’ rights issues and economic differences, not slavery. While Fred Langford didn’t go so far as refer to the Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression,” it was clear that he didn’t want to mention that southern plantation owners enslaved human beings. I don’t recall any mention of slaves the entire year or, for that matter, of Jim Crow laws.
So that’s where we are now with the GOP: even the supposedly moderate Haley, the establishment Republicans’ choice, feels the need to kowtow to white supremacists. What particularly bothers me is that this descendant of Sikh immigrants (her full name is Nimarata Nikki Randhawa) has thrown in her lot with a party that is demonizing people of color. I think of the white supremacist who, a year after 9-11, shot ten members of a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six of them. Does Haley really think she will placate such people by signaling that she doesn’t think that slavery was a big deal? Does she think that they will regard her as white like them? I think of the Association of German National Jews, which endorsed Hitler in his early days before they were rebuffed by the Nazis.
To be clear, I’d rather have Haley than Trump for president. She seems less likely to corrupt the Department of Justice, the military, and other institutions. Nor will she throw in with Putin, destroy NATO, or abandon Ukraine. But while she may not aspire to be Big Brother, as I noted in a blog post this past February she reminds me of another character in 1984. I reprint that post today:
Reprinted from February 16, 2023
Tuesday
“Kim” on Spoutify has just reminded me of a passage from 1984 that describes all too well many of today’s GOP apparatchiks, one of whom has just announced she will be running for president. In the words of Atlantic columnist and former Republican Tom Nichols, the video announcing the candidacy of South Carolina governor Nikki Haley
was as vapid and weightless a product as any in recent political memory. Of course, it checked all the right boxes: Family, devotion to public service, all the usual generic gloss, and all of it presented as if the past seven years had never happened.
Quoting fellow NeverTrumper and former GOP consultant Stuart Stevens, Nichols notes that, just days after the January 6 insurrection, “Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA.” And then a few months after that Haley said of Trump that “we need him in the Republican Party” and “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.” “She’ll never snatch the green jacket from the Master’s Open in Sucking Up from Lindsey Graham,” Nichols concludes, “but she’s certainly putting in the effort.”
The reason Nichols singles out Haley for special scorn is because, as a youthful and formerly moderate woman of color, she once seemed to offer the GOP a different path forward. But like so many of these figures—New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik also comes to mind—she has totally thrown in with Big Brother.
That’s what political cult worship does to one: it hollows out your principles (if you ever had any) and renders you stupid. That’s why comparing Haley to Winston Smith’s next door neighbor Tom Parsons is altogether apt. Both have drunk the Kool-Aid:
Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years.
The stability—or at least continuance—of Trumpism depends on the Haleys of the world. Like Nichols and Stevens, I don’t believe anything less than continued electoral defeats will bring the GOP back to its senses. Or as Nichols puts it, “no person or party should ever get a second chance to betray the Constitution.”
Further thought: Contrasting Haley’s Tom Parsons to Trump’s Big Brother brings to mind T. S. Eliot’s contempt for authoritarian wannabes in “The Hollow Men.” Better to be a lost violent soul, he says, than a hollow men:
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
By opening his poem with an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness–“Mistah Kurtz–he dead”–Eliot is telling us that he’d choose a villainous brute like Kurtz over a wishy-washy scarecrow. While I myself will take a scarecrow any day and find Eliot’s preference for an authoritarian leader problematic (and similarly problematic the celebration of Kurtz by Marlow, Conrad’s narrator in Heart of Darkness), the poem does a good job of depicting figures like Haley. She blows as the wind blows:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
And yet a further thought: T.S. Eliot’s contempt for such people also shows up “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
As she refuses to criticize Donald Trump in her campaign, Haley appears to be opting for the “attendant lord” role. Which is to say Polonius to Hamlet. Or Tom Parson to Trump’s Big Brother.