From General Moultrie on, South Carolinians have been fighters, but average Republican voters aren’t embracing neoconservatism.
CHARLESTON, S.C.—One doesn’t have to travel very far in South Carolina to discover reminders of its martial spirit.
Eight military bases are scattered across the state. They include Parris Island, where U.S. Marines pass through boot camp—an experience fictionalized in Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.”
Behind glass at the Charleston Museum, a pair of intricately carved 19th-century dueling pistols stand in for an old honor culture that still hasn’t been totally extirpated from the American South.
The same South Carolina that supplied great military leaders like Revolutionary War General William Moultrie, nicknamed the “Gamecock,” produced the pro-slavery representative, Democrat Preston Brooks, who in 1856 beat abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Mass.) half to death with a cane in the Senate chamber.
Not far away from the Charleston Museum, across the water from the spot where General Moutrie built his famous fort of palmetto logs, is the place where the American Civil War began. Fort Sumter hunkers low over Charleston Harbor.
Just outside Charleston’s airport, near the Air Force base, sits a symbol of the modern military-industrial complex: the North Charleston Boeing Plant.
Former South Carolina governor and presidential hopeful Nikki Haley’s connection to Boeing, where she served on the board of directors, has become a talking point for her foes, particularly those siding with former President Donald Trump.
Yet, while campaigning in the Palmetto State—a nickname honoring the fort created by General Moultrie—Ms. Haley has bragged about the aerospace giant’s local manufacturing activity, which came about through a deal hatched under her predecessor, former Gov. Mark Sanford.
“By the time I left, we were building planes with Boeing,” Ms. Haley told a crowd at New Realm Brewing Company on Charleston’s Daniel Island during a Feb. 4 campaign stop.
South Carolinian Bill Warren, who was waiting to hear the former governor speak, told The Epoch Times, “I think that South Carolina’s got a long history of not being afraid to mix it up.”
Ms. Haley’s hawkish rhetoric on the Russia–Ukraine war, the Israel–Hamas war, and other flash points thousands of miles away has led some critics to dub her a “neocon,” or neoconservative.
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