Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and current Republican presidential candidate, is taking a page from the fascist playbook and claiming that things were “simple” and “easy” back when life in the United States was about “faith, family, and country.” We can go back to that idyllic past, she says, if Joe Biden is voted out of office.
You remember that time, right? When everyone was a Christian nationalist in a nuclear family, none of those awful minorities existed, and everything was harmonious and peaceful?
Huh, yeah—I don’t remember that, either.
The truth is, reminiscing about a utopian, homogenous past is a very old tactic among fascists and authoritarians. Even if none of their followers believe that past ever existed, the myth gives them something to rally behind. Indeed, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Nazi propaganda placed a similar emphasis on a romanticized past, framing “family, race, and Volk [‘the people’] as the highest representations of German values” and claiming that Nazism would bring Germany back to those values.
More immediately, though, the people of Twitter are dragging Haley for how transparently ridiculous her claim is. (To be clear, she probably knows how ridiculous it is—propaganda is a strategy, not a sincere set of beliefs.)
First, there’s the obvious fact flaw in Haley’s execution. She’s not harkening back to some time before any of us were born. She’s claiming that we should go back to looking at the world the way we did when we were children.
More than that, though, people are calling out the bald-faced lie that the U.S. has ever had a rosy past, and life was far from “simple” and “easy” for lots of people growing up. Content note: some of these tweets contain references to violence, sexual assault, self-harm, and other things Haley claims never happened.
Here’s Bernice King, civil rights leader and daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., laying it out:
Plenty more people have taken a moment out of their day to hit back at Haley.
Although I’d be astonished if Haley cares about any of these responses, it’s still important to push back against this kind of propaganda. Revisionism like this is meant to erase the histories of everyone who has struggled to create a better world, and only by being vocal about those histories can we combat Haley’s brand of folksy authoritarianism.
(featured image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
