Why Are Republicans Still Debating Slavery and Insurrection?

This particular problem with the past is not a new one for today’s Republicans. Governor DeSantis called Haley’s reply an “incomprehensible word salad,” and said it wasn’t that difficult to identify “the role slavery played”—yet he has faced criticism for Florida’s new public-school standards, which suggest that some Black people benefitted from the institution. (DeSantis majored in history at Yale and briefly taught the subject at a private high school in Georgia; according to the Times, he “got into debates about the Civil War with students who questioned the focus, and sometimes the accuracy, of his lessons.”) Chris Christie accused Haley of being “unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth,” and mocked her error again last week, in a speech announcing the suspension of his campaign. Ramaswamy offered the most complete response, pointing to the sectional and political tensions that had existed for decades prior to 1861 before noting that, without slavery, none of them was sufficient to ignite the maelstrom of civil war. Previously, however, he had espoused the discredited theory that the Second Amendment secured the freedom of former slaves (by allowing them to defend it with guns) and deemed Juneteenth a “useless” holiday.