There Are No Good Republican (Politicians)

 My wife and I have argued about whether you can be a good person and a Republican in the year of our Lord 2023. I struggle with the idea that you can see what the GOP has become and voluntarily identify with them. She, however, is a people person and knows some Republicans whom she personally likes. In fact a former student wants to run as a Republican and wants my wife to help her run her campaign. This person is a nice person, but I would want to know the answer to two questions: Would you codify Roe and who won the 2020 election?

I guess we can now ask a third question: What was the cause of the Civil War? Nikki Haley is trying - I think - to position herself as the post-Trump Republican. Whether that comes this year because he's in prison or in 2028, Haley is a fairly "normal" Republican by 2015 standards. However, how the hell do you not mention slavery as the cause of the Civil War?

I grew up in the South in the 1970s and '80s. I grew up not so much in the Lost Cause school of history as the Nikki Haley "Let's not talk about it" school of history. The Civil War somehow happened and then Reconstruction was just as bad and let's move on, OK? 

However, I did not stop learning in 1985. What's more, the last of the Lost Cause books and scholars died off and faded away. Even more importantly is that Haley absolutely knows that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. She was the one who took down the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol grounds after the Emanuel AME shooting in Charleston. There's been a LOT of discourse over the persistent myth that the Civil War was caused by vaguely other causes. Was it JUST slavery? Not exactly, but if the South was willing to see slavery end or even be constrained, then the Civil War would not have happened. Full stop.

How do we evaluate the moral character of someone like Haley, who knows better but cannot admit in a public setting a central historical fact? Sure, she's pandering. But what does that tell us? We've watched Lindsay Graham debase himself time and again for Trump, a man we know he privately loathes. The fact that many of is - but not apparently the media - learned in 2016 that a discomforting number of our countrymen are at least OK with racism if not openly advocating it.

So, again, every Republican running for office needs to answer three basic questions: 

- Would you vote to codify Roe or would you ban abortions?
- Who won the 2020 election?
- Was slavery bad?

The last two...