Republican candidates struggle with Civil War history as party grapples with race issues in present
WASHINGTON — While Republicans make their case for the future, they remain stuck in the past.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spent much of the summer in controversy over new education standards that call for teaching slaves to develop skills that could be “applied to their personal benefit.” Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley last month failed to mention slavery as the root cause of the civil war. And former President Donald Trump last weekend called the Civil War “so fascinating” and said it could have been “negotiated,” sidestepping the fundamental dilemma of slavery.
Such moments reflect the tension within the Republican Party — the Party of Lincoln that abolished slavery, won the Civil War and began Reconstruction — with the first primaries of the 2024 election just around the corner. Some in the party’s conservative base, which has deep roots in the Deep South, are more willing to overlook unpleasant historical facts about the Civil War at a time when they feel besieged by the left amid the movement to erase Confederate monuments and names delete from settings. . Others fear the controversy will damage the party’s ambitions to make inroads with nonwhite voters, who may be turned away by minimizing the historical horror of slavery.
On the eve of Monday’s Iowa caucuses, Republicans are growing increasingly frustrated with the dynamics and have tried to swing the issue back to Democrats.
“Frankly, I’m getting damn tired of the reinterpretation of history I’m hearing from Democrats,” Jeff Kaufmann, chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa, said Tuesday during the state party’s annual legislative breakfast. “The Republican Party came into being because Democrats didn’t want to give up slavery.”
The prominence that slavery and the Civil War have played in the Republican Party’s primaries is notable at a time when the next president faces immediate challenges, including two major wars and a domestic economic recovery that many voters say they are not feeling . Some fear the party risks losing the chance to make inroads into President Joe Biden’s support, especially as Arab American, Black and Latino leaders increasingly say the president is vulnerable among voters of color.
Biden and his fellow Democrats are eager to highlight the Republican Party’s missteps. Biden said Monday at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine Black parishioners were murdered by a white supremacist in 2015, that it was a “lie” that the Civil War was about states’ rights.
“Let me be clear, for those who don’t seem to know, slavery was the cause of the Civil War,” he said. “That is non-negotiable.”
Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Florida shortly after DeSantis introduced the new historic standards to criticize the policy, accusing Florida Republicans of being “extremists” who want to “replace history with lies.”
Republican leaders are aware of the criticism and are eager to push back on any characterization that the party has abandoned its abolitionist roots.
Republicans were founded “because someone had to take a bold, uncompromising stand on human rights and civil liberties. That’s not awake. That is a fact,” said Kaufmann, chairman of the Iowa GOP. “We are the party of Abraham Lincoln. We have always been the party of Abraham Lincoln.”
While the controversies focus on the past, conservative resistance to broader narratives of American history is rooted in concerns about the social implications they carry, experts say.
“The Republican Party strongly supports an understanding of American history that we are a country that is exceptional, that we have brought freedom to the world, that we have overcome the challenges of the past and that we should be proud of that. our past,” said Paul Peterson, director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.
Democrats, Peterson said, will be “more likely to say that there is a lot in our past that we need to think about and maybe apologize for.”
Republican candidates have spent months arguing among themselves about historical issues. DeSantis and Trump have both criticized Haley for her comments on the Civil War. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the Senate, criticized DeSantis for Florida’s history standards, saying slavery was “devastating” and that he “would hope that everyone in our country — and certainly candidates for president — would appreciate that. .”
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who suspended his campaign on Wednesday, referenced the Civil War in a word of warning to Republican voters. Benjamin Franklin, Christie recalled, said that Americans had “got a republic, if you can keep it.”
“Benjamin Franklin’s words have never been as relevant in America as they are today. The last time they were this relevant was the Civil War – which we know was caused by slavery,” Christie said.
The intraparty jabs reflect a broader debate about the civil war’s legacy for contemporary policymaking.
“The Civil War was more than 150 years ago, and we still haven’t fully come to terms with its consequences for this society,” said Eric Foner, professor emeritus at Columbia University and author of histories of the Republican Party and the Civil War.
“I think there’s a general sense among Republicans and conservatives across the board that the people who are trying to tear down statues and try to rename the streets are against American history and everything about America that we used to believe it was good. the past is now being portrayed as evil,” said Geoff Kabaservice, vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center, a center-right think tank.
Such sentiments are widely shared among Republican voters, who may react “with polarization and partisanship on these historical issues” in response to broader cultural shifts in understanding America’s central story, Kabaservice said.
The Civil War debate also highlights other realities about the Republican Party’s coalition, which is now based in the American South rather than the North, where the party was founded. Democrats and Republicans “have essentially stolen the other party’s clothes from the 19th century,” Foner said.
“I think it is very possible to recognize the sins of the country, even the atrocities committed in this country, and also its noble ideals and promises,” Kabaservice said.
“But this isn’t really a time for dealing generously with complexity and nuance, so those kinds of things get lost in the politics we have today.”
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Matt Brown is a member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on social media.
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