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**JANUARY 4, 2024**
On the Prospect website
Time for a Victory Lap?
Those who believed inflation would be transitory were proven right, and
those who demanded the sacrifice of mass unemployment proven wrong. BY
JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ
Harbinger in Hollywood
A tattered entertainment industry is hoping to solve its problems with
mergers. Will Biden's aggressive antitrust enforcers force a Plan B?
BY DAVID DAYEN
Cruzin' for a Bruisin': Can Anyone Defeat Ted?
After 12 years in office, the junior senator podcasts more than he
legislates. But history suggests Texans will give him six more years to
talk. BY JUSTIN MILLER
Meyerson on TAP
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**** Why Nikki Stammered
Is it possible to say anything historically accurate without offending
the Republican base?
Whatever else Nikki Haley may be, she is no idiot. She understands full
well that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. What she also
understands, however, is that it's not politic to say so in the state
she had governed, in the white South generally, and in right-wing
America today.
That alone, though, would not have reduced her to the stammering
incoherence of the answer she gave when confronted with the
cause-of-the-Civil War question while on the stump in New Hampshire. She
is campaigning for president, after all, as the Sensible Republican's
Alternative to Donald Trump. Many (though definitely not all) of the
college-educated and country-club Republicans who, while no longer the
party's base, make up the lion's share of the voters she has been
wooing doubtless believe that slavery was indeed the cause of the Civil
War. Worse yet, Wall Street deity Jamie Dimon has urged the Democrats in
his circle to support her as a way to keep Trump from winning the
Republican nomination. And if you're in Jamie Dimon's circle, you
can write hefty checks.
In Freudian terms, then, Haley's stammer was overdetermined. Just as
fear of alienating the party's Trump-ophile base has kept Haley and
Ron DeSantis from attacking Trump, the same fear rendered her
tongue-tied on the slavery question, even as an offsetting fear of
alienating New Hampshire's flinty, if few remaining, empirically
guided Republicans reduced her answer to the sheerest babbling.
(In a sense, Haley's incoherence has its counterpart in Claudine
Gay's incoherence when asked about how Harvard would respond to
advocacy of genocide. Each weighed the conflicting concerns of their
various constituencies and came out with answers not likely to be
entered in the annals of common sense.)
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The Southern myths about the causes of the Civil War, about what it was
that the South was presumably fighting for, have been with us since
1865. They began to creep northward after Reconstruction ended, and for
most of the following century-really, until the Second Reconstruction
of the 1960s-the notion that the conflict had been over states'
rights or that slavery wasn't central to understanding the war's
very essence was the common textbook account of the war. Since then,
generations of historians, following the lead of James McPherson,
Kenneth Stampp, and Eric Foner, have exhaustively documented slavery's
centrality to the war. In recent decades, however, the rise of fabulist
right-wing media has rekindled not just widespread counterfactual
beliefs about the present but about the past as well.
In a
**USA Today**/Suffolk University poll
out today, fully two-thirds of Trump supporters say they don't think
Joe Biden was legitimately elected president in 2020. It shouldn't be
surprising that those of our compatriots who see themselves as victims
of a liberal elite working against the interests of white people
associate themselves with the Confederates of the 1860s. Never mind that
it was chiefly the wealthy slave owners who advocated secession and that
many of the South's poor white farmers bitterly resented having to
abandon their farms to fight for the slaveholders. In the whitewashed
stories that many in today's Republican base have come to believe,
such class differences are passed over-just as today's Republican
base voters are defined by their allegiance to a billionaire who they
believe will, if not lift them up, at least bring down those they
despise.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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