HALEY MAKES A PLAY FOR MAGA BASE WITH DOG WHISTLES

Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has long been characterized by the mainstream media as a more reasonable Republican than her potential 2024 competitors. Her 2024 presidential campaign kickoff suggests she is hardly an alternative to white-grievance mongers.

In her speech on Wednesday, she echoed the GOP’s nasty war on “wokeism” — an all-purpose slur against efforts to advance inclusion and racial equality. On President Biden and Vice President Harris’s watch, she said, “a self-loathing has swept our country. It’s in the classroom, the boardroom and the backrooms of government.” She added, “Every day, we’re told America is flawed, rotten and full of hate. Joe and Kamala even say America is racist.”

Really? Just this month Biden ended his State of the Union address — as he often does with his speeches — with a patriotic flourish: “We are the United States of America and there is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity if we do it together.”

Haley’s appeal to the MAGA crowd was also evident in a campaign ad released on Tuesday. It begins with Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, describing her hometown in South Carolina. “The railroad tracks divided the town by race,” she says. The railroad did it? Or was it the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws and the resistance to integration by whites? As is typical among Republicans these days, she blurs over the real roots of American division to avoid reminding whites of the original sin of slavery.

It gets worse from there. The ad intones that “some” say the country’s founding principles are “bad” and “racist and evil” while flashing images of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Black commentator Danielle Moodie doing a TV hit on the New York Times’s “1619 Project.” This, of course, misconstrues “The 1619 Project” (written by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, not Moodie), which explores the heroic struggle to perfect democracy that was corrupted by the institution of slavery.

Later in the ad, Haley claims that “the socialist left” see an “opportunity to rewrite history” while flashing photos of Biden, Harris and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (not one of them a socialist). Umm, these are not the people banning books, censoring teachers and blocking high school courses about African American history.

Hannah-Jones tweeted in response to the ad, “To deploy the 1619 Project and Black protest movements as progenitors of anti-American hatred when in fact what they both show is NO GROUP has fought for the ideals of equality and freedom more than Black Americans is just highly offensive.”

It’s not Democrats who are making schools a battleground for white grievance. They’re not the ones accusing the other side of hating America. This sort of message comes from Republicans. They’re the ones trying to generate fear with images of Black and Hispanic faces and portray Democrats as out to destroy Western civilization.

Their gambit reflects what author Isabel Wilkerson describes as white America’s “fear, insecurity and resentment in a desperate attempt to maintain dominance” in a new edition of her book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”

However, she argues that we need not be forever trapped in a racial caste system that “turns neighbor against neighbor.” Now, Wilkerson writes, is “no time for infighting or tribalism or selfcentered egotism or internal division.” Instead, she urges Americans “to do all that we can in our spheres of influence to make this a fairer world, to educate ourselves and our children about our true and full history, to alert legislators and policymakers to the depths of what they, and we, are up against.”

That’s the last thing Haley and her fellow Republicans want. Just like her potential competitors, Haley is channeling the base’s fear of losing power. Those defending American pluralistic democracy and the promise to form “a more perfect union” should not be confused about the opposition they face.