By now, most readers of Daily Kos are quite familiar with the eye-popping assertion by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who offered the GOP’s response to the State of the Union for 2016, regarding America’s history of dealing with immigrants.
For those unfamiliar, the “money quote” was as follows:
"When you've got immigrants who are coming here legally, we've never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion. Let's not start that now,”
Earlier in the week, a defense of Haley on this particular assertion came from a surprising corner: Kevin Drum of Mother Jones. This was the essence of his defense of Haley:
So let's dial down the faux outrage. Haley was doing the Lord's work here, criticizing Donald Trump's call to bar Muslims from entering the country. In fact, given the context, she might have meant to refer not to immigrants at all, but merely to people visiting the country on ordinary visas—in which case she didn't really say anything wrong at all. Either way, though, she did nothing worse than betray an incomplete knowledge of American history while talking off the cuff. It's hardly a big deal.
Let’s stipulate a few things here: I like and admire Kevin Drum a great deal. Not only for his writing, which I enjoy immensely, but for the very open and human way in which he is willing to discuss his battle with multiple myeloma, a cancer that also afflicted my own father (though only diagnosed five months before his death due to heart disease). While there is no political writer I agree with 100 percent of the time, I find that I agree with Drum a lot more often than not.
But not on this one. I believe that, viewed through a wider lens, Haley’s “mistake” was far more indicative of a pattern than an errant observation made in the scrum of a presser.
Now, if anyone is going to nitpick a comment like Haley’s, I must confess that I am a likely candidate.
Writing for Daily Kos/Daily Kos Elections, as it happens, is my incredibly fulfilling “second job.” My day job, as many regular readers already know, is as a social studies teacher at a high school in suburban Los Angeles. In particular, I have taught Advanced Placement United States History for the past three years (and taught AP Government for a decade or more before that). So, if anyone is going to be aghast at someone often hyped as future presidential or vice-presidential timber betraying such a stunning failure to grasp U.S. History, I’m your man.
The issue, from where I sit, is deeper than a simple slip-up in a reply to a particularly noxious policy proposal by a member of her own party. It is part of what has, regrettably, become a larger pattern within Haley’s political party, which has been at war with American History for quite some time.
Let’s be clear on that last point: this is nothing new. Our own Hunter wrote about it back in 2011, and I added my own take on the subject just eleven months ago. Hell, the struggle to define (or re-define) American History has probably been an agenda item on the political right even long before Howard Zinn penned A People's History of the United States way back in the day.
When I took up the issue last year, the inspiration was a flurry of activity in red-state legislatures (authored and promoted, in large part, by people with no background in American History) seeking to drastically alter U.S. History education. The proposals ran the gamut, from forcing schools to show Dinesh D’Souza propaganda films to banning students from taking the AP US History class altogether.
At the time, I wrote this:
Perhaps more disturbing is the entirely plausible notion that something is more sinister at work here than merely "working the refs" to try to present a sanitized (err ... positive) view of American History.
For example, it is far easier for conservatives to reintroduce Jim Crow-esque voting restrictions that largely fall on the shoulders of minority voters if history classes are compelled to pretend as if racial discrimination never existed in America in the first place.
(Fun fact: Nikki Haley was governor of the state when their voter ID law was struck down by the Department of Justice in December of 2011.)
American History is a complex beast. It is critically important to understand all of it: the travesties, as well as the triumphs. Given the nearly ceaseless efforts of far too many conservatives to ignore the darker episodes in the extraordinary narrative that is our nation’s story, it becomes incredibly hard to acquit Haley of an innocent lapse in memory.
I wish I could give Haley the “break” that Drum advocates, given that her observation came in the larger context of apparently trying to rein in the Trumpification of her party.
The problem for Haley, however, is that voices in her party have, for far too long, squandered away all of her benefit of the doubt on this particular subject.