“Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt?” Nikki Haley, a Republican presidential candidate, asked in a recent tweet. “It was about faith, family, and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out.”
Yes, I remember growing up. No, I don’t remember “how simple life was, how easy it felt.” Neither does Haley.
She isn’t delusional, as many among the more than 25,000 replies to her tweet suggested since she posted it Saturday. Haley is pandering and trying to recharge her lagging campaign with the pernicious fantasy that to move forward this nation must move backward to an America that was anything but a “simple life” for all.
It’s been four months since Haley, UN ambassador during the first two years of Donald Trump’s administration, became the first Republican to challenge her former boss. And despite that head start in what’s become an ever-expanding GOP field, Haley’s poll numbers haven’t budged past 5 percent.
Haley has mostly avoided saying Trump’s name directly. Yet during her campaign launch in February, she said her party needs to evolve into a post-Trump era. “We’re ready — ready to move past the stale ideas and faded names of the past,” she said. “And we are more than ready for a new generation to lead us into the future.”
But in her tweet, Haley looked back. The “simple life” she summoned was a treacherous time of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, illegal abortions that maimed and killed women and girls, when spousal rape was not considered a crime, and homosexuality was branded as a “psychiatric disorder” by the American Psychiatric Association.
In an attempt to gain traction among Trump-leaning Republicans, she’s selling her own custom-tailored version of “Make America Great Again” to those who might like the message more than its original messenger. With Haley, it’s a wistful nod toward the toxic nostalgia of perfect white families in perfect white neighborhoods where men worked, women were housewives in pearls and heels, and their kids never considered a world where everyone didn’t look, think, talk, worship, and exist just like them.
Haley, of course, personally knows that “simple life” never existed. In her 2012 memoir, “Can’t Is Not an Option: My American Story,” she recalls the “ignorance, prejudice, and sometimes blatant hostility” her parents faced when they moved from their native India to Bamberg, a small South Carolina city. She mentions a childhood incident when she and her father, while buying produce at a fruit stand, were approached by two police cars simply because her father’s traditional Sikh turban ignited irrational white suspicions.
That same thing, Haley writes, “would never happen to him today. South Carolina is a different place.” That would certainly be news to Walter Scott, a Black man shot in the back five times and killed by a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., in 2015, and the nine Black churchgoers murdered by Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, in Charleston during their evening Bible study that same year.
Haley was South Carolina’s governor during the Charleston Nine massacre, and she resisted removing the Confederate flag from outside of the State House in Columbia. Only after a manifesto and photos of Roof, who viewed the racist, violent Confederacy as his North Star, posing with that treasonous symbol surfaced did Haley finally agree to take the flag down: “We are not going to allow this symbol to divide us any longer,” she said.
(Activist Bree Newsome Bass didn’t wait for Haley — she scaled the pole and briefly detached the flag two weeks before Haley signed the order.)
But in her 2019 book, “With All Due Respect: Defending America with Grit and Grace,” Haley said, “The evil act [Roof] had committed had robbed the good-intentioned South Carolinians who supported the flag of this symbol of heritage and service.”
By then, the Republican Party had plunged into full-on MAGA mode with Confederate flags displayed by sycophants at Trump rallies. And Haley was busy giving racists a pass and shoring up her political future by indulging those who claim that flag represents everything other than virulent hate.
That’s exactly what she’s doing now. Haley calls “wokeness,” which she struggled to define, “a virus more dangerous than any pandemic.” And she blamed trans student athletes for triggering suicidal ideation in cisgendered teens when it’s well-documented that it’s young trans people who have staggeringly high rates of suicidal risk.
Defending trans rights isn’t a winning strategy for any Republican candidate with serious dreams of a nomination. So Haley is centering her campaign in the rigid order of disenfranchisement, white supremacy, and easy-listening Trumpism.
Haley’s memories of a “simple life” are deeply disingenuous but predictably on-brand. For much of her political career, the truth has rarely found purchase in a conscience barren except for ambition, shapeshifting, and lies.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.