Kind of Gray

At an event on Wednesday, a voter asked Haley: "what was the cause of the United States Civil War?"

She replied that the cause "was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn't do."

"I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are," Haley continued. "And I will always stand by the fact that, I think, government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people."

After Haley gave her answer, the voter told her that it was "astonishing" that she gave an answer "without mentioning the word 'slavery.'"
Nikki Haley didn't say slavery caused the Civil War. Now she's facing major backlash

Personally, I'm not really sure why one would bother to ask Nikki Haley what she thinks of the Civil War. ("And I wanted to see what you think was the cause of the Civil War," does not strike me as a good reason.) The fact that it was going to result in an open pander to conservative Southerners who still want to hold on to the idea that the nation as a whole should consider their ancestors to have been good people in spite of the fact that slavery is now considered one of the worst evils of humankind (a rather predictable trap that occurs when one believes in absolute morality) should have been evident from the start. And maybe that was the point. After all, I'm pretty sure that whomever asked the question was expecting the response they received.

And that response does the following:

• It casts a good chunk of the Southern population as brittle and backwards. But this is just reinforcing the stereotype that a lot of people already have of White Southerners; closeted Klansmen who will, the moment the opportunity presents itself, re-litigate the Civil War in the hopes of reinstating at least Jim Crow, if not chattel slavery. Those same White Southerners are already well aware, and resentful, of this stereotype.
• It casts the Republican Party as dependent on "deplorables." Again, this is a stereotype that a lot of people who aren't Republicans (and some who are) already hold. In a republic where one person has one vote, the votes of bigots count for just as much as everyone else. And pointing out, again and again, that people see Republican voters as tolerating bigotry does little other than give (alleged) Republican office-seekers, like Nikki Haley a reason to stoke resentment of the contempt in which those voters are held.
• It boxes in those people who think that what Ms. Haley has said is garbage. Because anyone who stands up to say that Ms. Haley's statements make them look bad to the rest of the nation will be immediately tarred as being a shill for the Democrats.

And I don't see how any of that helps anything. I suppose that there are some number of people out there who were both considering voting for Nikki Haley and of the opinion that the South needs to own up to wrongdoing in the case of slavery, and those voters may now go somewhere else. But who cares? It's not as if Ms. Haley had, at any point in this process, a snowball's chance in a blast furnace of securing the Republican nomination to be their general election candidate.

All of that noted, it's worth pointing out that one of "the freedoms and what people could and couldn't do" that Ms. Haley feels that "government" had become involved in was the right to treat other human beings as a combination of personal property, machines and livestock. Given that, she could have come up with an answer that spoke the language of freedom and rights by saying that that the war was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of people that governments, local and federal, had openly neglected up to that point.

Of course, however, it's understood that casting the South as being willing to wage war to deny "the rights and freedoms of people" they relied on for cheap labor would have Ms. Haley branded a traitor in the South. So she would have needed to be more "nuanced" than I was, above. But that's a poor reason for her to not be prepared to deal with the question. After all, she's a politician. Weasel wording one's way out of difficult questions is a requirement for the job.