America Needs Nikki Haley’s Triumphalism
Why I support her long-shot candidacy, indeed she’s the only person I can see myself voting for
This morning I read The Economist’s Lexington column on American affairs, on Nikki Haley’s campaigning in Iowa. After remarking on the time she lowered the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capital, and quoting her declared presidential ambition to “treat every person with respect,” the Economist, one of my primary neoliberal news outlets supportively concludes, “America is well past the point where it can indulge a sentimental view of the Confederate flag. But maybe Iowa can still help it hope for a more generous Republican politics.”
I have always liked Nikki Haley as a presidential candidate, since she announced she was running for the nomination. Although I’ve reflected I would like it more if she properly went after Trump in her rhetoric and speeches, I understand how risky that would be (though she does not conceal her distaste for January 6th), and I love her message regardless. For example, I loved her populist jab at both Biden and Trump that we should have “competency tests” for leaders who may be too old to be considered fit for office. Similarly I deeply appreciate her calls for entitlement reform. And it’s outstanding to me how she makes no concessions, and wastes no time pandering, to the white male, uneducated blue collar voting bloc—the darling faction of both our far right and far left political parties, respectively.
Remarks and declarations to the effect that we should attribute America’s recent moral backsliding and weakness— the loss of our self-confidence as a global superpower— to our fiscal-demographic trajectory, aided in no small part by the bloated entitlement state, voraciously consuming two thirds of the federal budget: suggest she has the foresight and the courage to craft her own vision for America’s future, with little regard for how popular her ideas and sentiments may prove.
In her South Carolina speech announcing that she was running for the presidency, she said, “I have always had a deep belief in America, but I know America is better than all the divisions and distractions we have today, and I’m confident that the American people agree. We’re ready… Ready to move past the stale ideas and faded names of the past and we are more than ready for a new generation to lead us into the future.” Besides, “future” I appreciate her “stale,” “faded,” and “distractions” choice of words.
Because for God’s sake, we need to move on and take a good hard look ahead. America needs to stop pitying itself. Because self-pity is un-American. Moreover rather than bloviate about “wokeness” everywhere, or “irregularities” in the last election—unlike some of her other Republican challengers—Nikki Haley instead chooses to condemn Bidenomics for destroying the free market. She says that with the trillions in federal deficits we’ve been piling on, we are “spiraling towards socialism.” Tell me about it. If you want a good example of socialism, look no further than Biden’s insane mortgage loan policy where the Federal Housing Finance Agency is penalizing house buyers with good credit scores to subsidize risky borrowers, by fiddling with the mechanism by which mortgages are priced—all for the purposes of “equity.”
Significantly Haley pins our institutional erosion in education and law enforcement at least, on the “self-loathing” of our leaders; i.e. Biden and Harris, and the white educated progressive activist groups, who have captured the Democratic party, propping them up, perpetually insinuating and stoking the corrosive lie that America is inherently a racist country. Take for example, Biden’s recent white supremacy speech at Howard College, where he took the time to warn an all black college in his commencement address that white supremacy is on the rise. The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker writes in his column, “Biden’s Bleak Story About Race in America is False,”
{in the speech} “There was no suggestion that the nation has made any progress toward King’s dream 60 years ago of a nation united through equality, unity and reconciliation. In Mr. Biden’s telling, the main advances black Americans have made all seem to have come in the past two years. He rattled off a list of his African-American senior appointees.”
Haley correctly outlines the danger that this self-abasement poses, claiming that our foreign adversaries will exploit and take advantage of our social divisions and our entirely unwarranted shame.
“Our enemies think that America’s era has past, they’re wrong. Americans are not past their prime. It’s only our politicians who are past theirs.” She goes on to say that on Biden’s watch a “terrorist mob took over Afghanistan,” which to me is even understating Biden’s failure there. She says Iran is on the brink of acquiring WMD’s. Russia is launching the most atrocious war in “75 years.” Nevertheless we owe our global vulnerability to our internal decay.
I could not agree more. I think that’s one of my big messages on this blog too; that America’s and the West’s issues are principally moral in nature, and the best thing we could do, as well as the first thing we should do, to address this abysmal, pathetic crisis of values unworthy of us: is to find in ourselves the supreme self-confidence— to regain and uphold the fundamental assumptions that make us rich as well as militarily powerful—Individual rights, free enterprise, free trade, freedom of the air and seas. Freedom for all humanity under the benevolent hegemonic protection of the allied, united, enlightened West, against tyranny, against unfreedom, against communism, against fascism, against illiberal democracy, against barbarism.
I have been reading this great book, The Peacemaker by William Inboden, all about how Reagan’s moral qualities in particular made him so well suited for ending the Cold War.
Inboden says that when someone asked Reagan why he wanted to be president, Reagan said bluntly “to end the cold war.” When the guy asked him how he would do that, he admitted he didn’t know, “but there has got to be a way.” In Inboden’s telling, Reagan’s geopolitical strategy was to turn the Cold war into a contest of philosophical ideas; and Thatcher did the same— Thatcher whose anticommunist views were shaped by works of literature like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and political philosophy, such as Friedrich Hayek’s analytically brilliant The Road to Serfdom, once said, “politics is philosophy in action” (as a big philosophy guy, that’s one of my favorite quotes of hers).
In his introduction Inboden says of Reagan, “every previous president saw the Cold War primarily as a great power conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, undergirded by a contest of ideas. Reagan reversed this. He saw the Cold War primarily as a battle of ideas, overlaid on a great power competition. As former Reagan NSC staff member Henry Nau describes, ‘for Reagan the bedrock force in international affairs was ideas…which defined the identities of nations and motivated the way they behaved in international institutions and what they did with their power.’ Because the Cold War was a stand-off between American ideals and Marxism Leninism, between freedom and tyranny, Reagan knew it would only end when one set of ideas bested the other. This shaped every aspect of Reagan’s Cold War strategy, including his arms build-up, information programs, diplomacy, covert actions, human rights policies and speeches. Many of Reagan’s most iconic speeches as president, from Notre Dame in 1981 to Moscow in 1988, can be read in sequence as his sustained argument against the Soviet System, which he saw not just as a nation state to be defeated but as a worldview to be refuted” (Inboden, 11).
Now some other Republican candidates also argue we need a moral-philosophical revival, like Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott, but their prescriptions are cheap, inauthentic, vague and watery in Ramaswamy’s case, and I find Tim Scott’s message perfectly nice and decent, but it’s too light. Nikki Haley’s platform though is a lot more pleasingly firm, hard, and righteous. There’s also a noble elitism about her character that demonstrates a sureness about the right kinds of social hierarchy. The Economist reports at one of her rallies someone yelled, “Nikki, make America civil again!”
At my private club recently I was talking to a family friend, who had served in the military and was almost deployed to Afghanistan. We were talking about how Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbechev worked together to end the Cold War—the most high stakes conflict since World War 2–which for decades at times was only impulses way from ending literally in armageddon. But R, T, and G negotiated a peace without firing a shot. My friend smiled and said enthusiastically, “Cool isn’t it?”
“It’s so cool!” I said.
I can see that Nikki Haley, to seize the mantle of American power and take on the world, intends to revive the moral conviction of the gipper, and to take a page or two out from his book. And in her staunch support for Ukraine, in particular to deter Xi in the Pacific, it’s a brilliant relief to witness someone who appreciates the existential magnitude of America’s global challenges, who understands that as our first-order priority, to address it, we need to overcome the unfortunate nihilistic rot of our postcolonial/liberal-arts-college virtually Maoist self-loathing; and to do so, not to bully and whip “wokeness” around performatively for attention, but instead to cure our crisis of self-belief by radiating outward her Southern, profoundly American confidence.
Getty images
Meg Kinnard AP
Nikki Haley’s like Thatcher and Reagan’s before her, is a politics of conviction. And America is starved for her unipolar triumphalism.
— Jay