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Nikki Haley's magical imaginary America [1]

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Date: 2023-06-25  

Nikki Haley has the solution for all that ails us — time travel — to a different planet. On Saturday, she posted a paean to the sun-dappled days of glorious youth. She evoked a magical place where God is both an all-beneficent hand on the temporal tiller and a celestial medic who salves the troubled soul.

In her imagining, a Biden loss will usher America back to a previous Utopia, where industrious fathers labor without complaint to bring home the bacon to an aproned domestic goddess. Their heteronormative cis children do not go past first base, use drugs, swear, or sass their parents. And America is a shining city on a hill, the envy of civilized nations, which attracts only talented white immigrants and Jewish physicists to develop nuclear weapons.

As she put it in a tweet.

x Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out. #RTM2023 — Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) June 24, 2023

It is standard conservative electioneering for a candidate to paint a picture of some utopian America they, and their prospective voters, agree was a far better place than the second-rate Democratically-led country they currently live in. This Eden is a mythic place that lurks one election away if enough people vote for the right — preferably far-right — candidate, presumably meaning themself.

Nikki Haley, who the casual observer once considered a traditional conservative, has embraced the Trump/DeSantis philosophy that America is a land ravening brown rapists and marauding Black LGBTQ activists who have turned public schools into reeducation camps dedicated to making children so miserable they will gender shift and embrace gay sex — instruction manuals provided - while socialists and feminazis cheer on the carnage.

Haley’s tweet is a masterpiece of magical thinking. Most people have an idealized memory of their youth. Children are not global thinkers. As long as halfway decent parents met their food and entertainment needs and they were not bullied too badly, most adults look fondly on the simpler, easier days of their youth.

Haley was born in South Carolina in 1972. It was the tail end of the Vietnam War protests. Racial disharmony was fueled by an energized civil rights movement clashing with conservative whites protecting their superior turf. Paint and gas (when you could buy it) were still leaded. The President was a crook. The average American died seven years younger . And marital rape was still legal.

Haley’s nostalgia raises two questions. When was America so good? And for whom? If you are Black, the best America — at least legally, educationally, and professionally is yet to come. Until 1865, most Blacks were constitutionally worth 3/5ths of a white person. From the end of Reconstruction to the 1950s, Blacks were separate and unequal. And even today by any social metric, Blacks have a harder row to hoe.

Women had no guaranteed political voice until 1920. And it was not until the 1980s that they received equality in the eyes of the law. And even today, American women still labor with pay disparity. I suppose the one time America was better for women, at least in one way, was between 1973 and 2022 when the law granted women bodily autonomy, and were a step above forced-birth handmaidens. But I doubt that reproductive freedom informs Haley’s utopianism.

For Native Americans, the best America existed before there was an America. For Hispanics, Asians, and Jews, things are getting better. But there is always some white guy willing to hurl insults, burn down their places of worship, desecrate their graves, punch them in the face, and mass murder a few because of God and 2A.

LGBTQ scored some wins in the 21st century. In 2003, in Lawrence vs. Texas , the Supreme Court shut the bedroom door on the prying eyes of hypocritical Puritans by recognizing that what adults did in the privacy of their homes — with or without their clothes on — was nobody’s business but their own. And after Obergefell vs. Hodges, Adam could marry Steve, and Eve could propose to her girlfriend.

Of course, with the current Court, all bets are off.

In reality, the only Americans who could legitimately believe there was once a better America are white men. But they only represent 30% of the population, So why should we listen to them? And Haley is only promoting their cause because she needs their votes.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/25/2177461/-Nikki-Haley-s-magical-imaginary-America

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