Nikki Haley doesn’t actually believe in anything

A master of triangulation gives us all a new lesson

I’d like to think I’m a pretty involved politico. I’m a policy wonk, and I love to play armchair political strategist the way other people—happier and mentally healthier people—play armchair football coach on fall weekends. Still, as much as I enjoy spinning out various possibilities for how campaign strategies might or might not affect the behavior of actual voters, this cycle’s Republican Primary campaign hasn’t held my interest at all.

Stories about Ron DeSantis wearing or not wearing lifts in his boots, Chris Christie’s pointless kamikaze mission against Donald Trump, some narcissistic rich guy named Vivek Ramaswamy who seems to be mostly running to be the next Tucker Carlson; it’s all been pretty boring. Blame that on Trump, I guess. When a quadruple-indicted wannabe authoritarian polls at over 60 percent while none of his opponents can get out of the teens, the stakes are clearly low enough to maybe skip a few of those campaign horserace stories.

Then last week, another also-ran, my state’s former Governor, Nikki Haley, was asked a simple question on the campaign trail in New Hampshire about what caused the Civil War, and her non-answer was too perfect for me to ignore.

Instead of some version of the the obvious historical truth—laid out in plain English in such documents as the South Carolina Declaration of Secession—that the issue of slavery was the root conflict responsible for the war, Haley offered this instead: “I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run—the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

My interest in that repugnantly ahistorical answer is based entirely on the person who shared it. As a long-suffering South Carolinian progressive, I’m deeply familiar with Nikki Haley and her tendency to triangulate at all times, lest she make the mistake of sharing a genuine human insight. After all these years, the most honest thing I can say about her—from her time in the State General Assembly as a Mark Sanford acolyte, to her tenure as Governor, to when she left our little backwater for the tepid embrace of the Trump administration—is that I’m pretty sure that Nikki Haley doesn’t actually believe in anything.

It ought to be pretty remarkable that someone who changes political convictions like most people change socks can rise from State House Representative in a small southern state to U.N. Ambassador in 12 years. It’s less remarkable though when you remember that a lot of people have just enough attention span to remember to change their socks every day. People who care about ideological consistency in their elected leaders are a minority, and they don’t decide elections. Nikki Haley’s career has always depended upon that fact.

From the moment she first entered the political arena in 2004, Haley has always tried to position herself where she thinks the Republican Party is heading. These days it means cozying up to MAGA world, which she’s managed to do perhaps better than anyone else. Back then though, it meant latching onto the ascendant economic libertarianism of figures like Paul Ryan and then-Governor Mark Sanford, one of Haley’s earliest champions. It was Sanford who first persuaded Haley to run for Governor in 2010, and once elected she governed more or less like him (minus the “hiking trip”).

Sanford had learned to use South Carolina’s gubernatorial line item veto power show off his fiscal conservative bonafides every year during the state budgeting process by making a show of vetoing long lists of spending measures he deemed unnecessary, knowing full well that the General Assembly would reconvene and override most of them. It was a brilliant bit of political maneuvering that allowed Sanford to signal to his constituents without having to worry about the consequences of slashing funding for projects that in many cases enjoyed broad support. Haley adopted the practice during her tenure, though she never did so quite as theatrically as her mentor, who once brought a pair of piglets to the Statehouse in protest of the supposed pork in that year’s budget.

Her remarkable ability to watch Fox News and turn the opinions spouted by its talking heads into her policy positions stretched beyond fiscal policy though. As Governor, she signed a South Carolina copy of Arizona’s 2010 immigration law, a messaging bill for Tea Party types that made being an undocumented immigrant a state misdemeanor and required state and local law enforcement to check a person’s immigration status if they had “reasonable suspicion” to do so. Much of the law was blocked by federal courts, something likely obvious to most of the Republican lawmakers who originally supported it. Latching onto another Republican immigration boogeyman during the Obama years, she asked the State Department not to resettle Syrian refugees in South Carolina in 2015.

Then, of course, there’s her position on the Confederate flag, which began flying over the Statehouse dome 1961 before being moved to a monument in front of the building in 2000.

Prior to the 2015 murder of nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by a homegrown white supremacist, Nikki Haley’s posture towards the flag was to treat the issue as an annoyance not worthy of her time. Her most famous quote on the topic—shared less than a year before the massacre—reflects what she surely considered smart Republican politics at the time: “I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag.”

It was a vile and cynical dodge, one that was meant to shift the focus to her preferred economic issue wheelhouse while not offending a South Carolina electorate that favored keeping the flag on Statehouse grounds. Eight months later, her calculus would shift, but interestingly, not immediately.

Before it became clear that the the General Assembly would likely move to remove the Confederate flag in the wake of the massacre at Mother Emanuel, Haley dodged again. Instead of leading the call to finally bring down the flag completely, Haley deferred to the General Assembly, saying simply that she expected they’d take up the issue. A few days later—enough time to watch dozens of South Carolina elected officials call for the flag’s removal and to take a guess at an eventual whip count in the General Assembly—Haley found her misplaced spine and joined the calls to remove the flag. She has touted her leadership during the ordeal ever since, as always counting on all of us to have forgotten how events had actually unfolded.

Her answer to the Civl War question in New Hampshire immediately reminded me of her response to the Confederate flag issue, both before and after the massacre. It was vintage Nikki Haley, leading from the back so as to not lose any potential Republican stragglers, no matter how repugnant their views might be.

In other words, this was not a gaffe. As always, Nikki Haley knew exactly what she was doing by not mentioning slavery when asked about a war caused by it. She could’ve taken any number of honest approaches to the question. She could’ve given the egghead answer, saying the war was caused by the South’s reaction to the election of Abraham Lincoln, whose Republican Party was founded in part on the principle that slavery should not be allowed to expand west as the nation grew. Southern leaders viewed that position as a first step towards ending slavery altogether, as free states would grow to outnumber slaveholding states.

She could’ve given a banal answer about a nation divided by its competing views of slavery and what it meant to value freedom, and how that division eventually led to war as those views became ireconcilable. She could’ve touted the Republican Party as the “party of Lincoln,” doing all the mental gymnastics necessary to tie the ending of slavery to some current Republican priority. She could’ve just said the institution of slavery led to the Civil War and left it at that.

Any of those would’ve been more correct than what she said, but again, she knew all that. Nikki Haley did what she does best though; she chose the position that gives no Republican a reason to not support her.

The most recent polling I could find on the issue seemingly backs up her choice. In a YouGov poll released last year, only 56 percent of those surveyed cited slavery as the primary issue in the Civil War, with 36 percent of Republicans citing “states’ rights” as the cause. To be fair, only 70 percent of those surveyed responded correctly that the North won the war, so there’s at least as much ignorance surrounding the issue as there is conservative attachment to lost cause mythology.

My takeaway from that poll and my own sense today’s political landscape is that Haley’s triangulation was the smart call for someone looking to be the standard bearer for a party whose most popular leader incited an insurrection when he lost his last election. The fact that it’s a disgusting position to take is beside the point. When you’re already willing to wallow in the mud to court the most reactionary factions in the 2024 electorate, what does a little erasure of history really matter?

Haley knows what her goal is, and she knows who she’s speaking to. She couldn’t have won statewide office down here otherwise. She knows very well that a whole bunch of people voting in Republican primaries over the next few months either won’t care about her answer at all, or worse, don’t believe slavery was at the root of the Civil War. The truly deplorable part is that she doesn’t care either way, and that is the most consistent part of her otherwise deeply inconsistent political career. Nikki Haley knows how to keep her eye on the prize.