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Last week, Senator Tim Scott became (briefly) the latest Republican politician to announce that they will be contesting the 2024 primary. Scott’s politics are certainly not my own - he’s hard right - but anyone familiar with him knows that he is a politician of prodigious gifts and a compelling biography. Raised by a single mother in poverty, he went on to become the first African-American senator elected from the South since Reconstruction, and is now the first African-American Republican officeholder to seek the presidency. He’s also known as a skilful retail politician who is extremely adept at fundraising.
In other words, on paper he looks like a candidate who ought to be taken very seriously - certainly more seriously than almost everyone else who is going to enter the primary. And many Democratic political operatives will indeed say that he is the candidate who they would be most uncomfortable running against in a general election. Why, then, does he stand virtually no chance of making it beyond the early stages of the primary? I think that in order to understand that you have to get over some very widespread misconceptions about what Tim Scott is doing.
What is Tim Scott really saying?
The common trope in the media is that Tim Scott is defined by his optimism, and to some extent that’s true. Scott’s signature move in politics is to push a hopeful, folksy take on America based on his own biography as an African-American senator. He often says that his family went from “cotton to Congress” in the space of his grandfather’s lifetime, and he attributes that to “the miracle of America”. In Tim Scott’s America, anyone who is hard-working and patriotic can achieve anything they want. All they have to do is choose “personal responsibility over resentment”.
This rhetoric often gets framed in the media as an antidote to heated rhetoric and frayed tempers on both sides, as if what Scott is offering is, in the words of one conservative columnist, a “theology of forgiveness”. But it seems very strange to me to think that Scott is really meaning to chastize Trump supporters along with Biden supporters, or that this is what most of his listeners hear.
Scott fits more easily into the long tradition of African-Americans who appeal to conservatives because they give their own credibility to the conservative version of America’s racial narrative. In this narrative, the idea that minorities face structural discrimination is a product of a left-wing victimhood complex and African-Americans can succeed just as well as anyone else in America if they take “personal responsibility” for their lives. Bill Cosby wrote a famous book making this argument, and Scott actually used the subtitle of that book (attributing it to his mom) - “from victims to victors” - in his announcement speech.
When Scott is telling this story and using his own biography as an example, this is what he’s really saying - that the conservative version of America’s racial narrative must be true if a family like his could really go from cotton to Congress in the space of one lifetime. And it’s no surprise that conservatives like to have a prominent African-American out there making that case. Donald Trump, for instance, welcomed Scott enthusiastically into the presidential race. What Scott isn’t doing - and what might have made Trump have second thoughts about extending his welcome - is telling the MAGA movement to get over its own victimhood complex or place its faith in the miracle of America.
The politics of personal responsibility
That’s actually a shame, because one can tell a very interesting history about how the politics of “personal responsibility” in America has changed over the past sixty years. During the “urban crisis” of the 1960s, the spectacle of drugs, poverty, rioting and family breakdown among African-Americans was famously attributed to their inability to take responsibility for their own lives rather than to the deep structural factors which created inequality and violence in the ghetto. Rather than admitting that American society needed to change, the white mainstream said that blacks needed to change.
Fast forward to today, and many of the same features of the “urban crisis” are visible in a “rural crisis” marked by wealth inequality, poor education, lots and lots of drugs, and “deaths of despair”. But the message of the dominant strain of conservatism today - Trumpism - is not that poor rural whites need to take responsibility for their own lives and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but that America is fundamentally broken and must be “made great again”. So righteous are their grievances and so unbearable are the injustices they must bear that it’s even okay to carry out an insurrection if that’s what it takes to make their voices heard. The law, the constitution, the most sacred traditions of the nation are nothing in comparison to their suffering, which is in no way their own fault.
Of course, a Republican who pointed out this disparity would stand no chance of advancing in the primary, which is why it’s very strange to me that many people imagine that this is actually the case that Tim Scott is making. The Republican Party has been captured by the forces of victimhood and grievance, and no serious challenge to them is possible. What Scott has managed to do is to find a way of talking which is sufficiently ambiguous to allow all of the interested parties - both conservatives and liberals - to suspend their disbelief because it’s in their own interests to do so. But that isn’t enough to win a primary, or possibly even survive as long as Iowa.
That’s why I don’t really buy all of the takes saying that the reason Scott will go nowhere in the primary is that the politics of optimism is out of fashion. I think that’s definitely part of the story, but more important is the fact that Scott’s message is essentially irrelevant to most of the GOP base. They simply don’t imagine that his platitudes are supposed to apply to them. And because Scott reportedly has no plans to criticize Trump or the MAGA movement directly, they likely never will.
What is he doing?
Everyone running in the GOP primary is facing essentially the same problem. In order to win a primary you need to criticize the frontrunner, but Donald Trump’s voters actually really like Donald Trump and so do not like to hear him criticized. This is why most of these candidates, even DeSantis, are doomed. Scott, who is currently polling near zero per cent, is especially doomed. His supposed signature move - criticizing the excesses of both sides - is not really what he actually does, and if he did start doing it then he would be obliterated by the MAGA steamroller. So what is he doing?
That’s an interesting question, and one that it’s hard to know the answer to without being inside Scott’s head. One theory is that he’s aiming to be picked as Trump’s Vice President and then possibly clear the field for a run of his own in 2028. The hypocrisy of this would be staggering, but that’s never stopped a politician before. One piece of evidence in favor of this theory is that Scott’s presence in the race actually helps Trump by allowing him to repeat the primary of 2016, when Trump was able to win because the anti-Trump vote was divided among so many other candidates. It’s also possible that Scott is gearing himself up for a transition into the conservative media complex, where he could use a nice perch at Fox News or somewhere similar to continue to promote his message.
The irony of all of this is that Scott is the one candidate in the primary that Democrats are most afraid of, if only the GOP would give him a chance. He’s much more conservative than the country at large, but he would give the Republican Party a completely new face and allow it to argue that it was moving on from the MAGA years. An old white Democrat running against a young black Republican would completely invert the narrative that Democrats are comfortable with. Scott wouldn’t inspire the same fanaticism as Donald Trump, but he could appeal much more strongly to swing voters and allow the party to make further in-roads among non-white voters. It won’t happen, of course, because the GOP is the GOP, and one man can’t change that now. Even - or especially - the first African-American senator to ever try.
P.S.
Of course, Ron DeSantis has just entered the race too. I’m sure you’ve heard all about it, particularly the technical glitches that marred his attempt at a dark alliance with Elon Musk. I try not to use this space to repeat things you’ve heard elsewhere, and if you want my take on DeSantis, check out my ‘DeSantis is blowing it’ from a few months ago. More to come when he does something else interesting.