Tim Scott, Front-Runner for 2024

I t is admittedly a little early to be placing bets on the 2024 presidential election, but the astonishing and almost unprecedented success of South Carolina Republican senator Tim Scott’s response to President Biden’s address to Congress has catapulted him forward among the ranks of Republican contenders, should President Trump decide not to enter the race. As the Democrats bill and coo and preen themselves, egged on by practically the entire national political media, which conducted the party’s presidential campaign in the absence and incomprehensibility of their putative candidates for national office, their position is very vulnerable. They are flying in the face of polls that report that an overwhelming majority of Americans want a compassionate but efficiently administered process of entry into the country and no significant numbers of illegal entries, and of polls that oppose violent demonstrations whatever their objective, oppose reduced funding for police, and favor photo identification for federal-election voters.

Only President Biden’s amiable and absent-minded manner and the continuing but dwindling efforts to maintain Trump-hate and COVID panic, the only non-socialist arguments the Democrats have had for the last five years, have propped Biden up above 50 percent approval through his post-electoral honeymoon. The Democrats are now a ramshackle coalition. It extends from radical African Americans, including the militant Black Lives Matter factions that torched a substantial part of America in “peaceful demonstrations” last summer and, through Hawke Newsome and other spokespeople, have promised to “burn America down” if they don’t achieve all of their radical objectives, to what is left of the traditional Democratic voting blocs among ethnic groups, the working class, academics, and the media. The retention of such an unworkable coalition always depends either on charismatic leadership of the FDR, JFK, or even Bill Clinton variety, or upon a broad agreement of goals among the different elements, as was generally the case under President Truman, LBJ (until the Vietnam derailment), and Obama.

Joe Biden’s charisma is a negative number, and it is precisely his underwhelming quality that provides a ballast of assurance opposite the succession of harebrained and extreme measures that are being brought forward in his name. The cutting edge of the Democrats is the Left, which has conveniently arrogated the word “progress” to itself, and whose leader, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, considers it to be 35 to 40 percent of the Democrats. These are the racist radicals, the forces of militant wokeness, and those who cannot in their waking hours utter a sentence or even a clause without including “systemic racism” or “existential crisis” (climate). For this Tower of Babel to remain upright, the approximately half of Democrats who are Caucasian are going to have to remain quiescent if not enthusiastic about the white-hating revanchism being touted in the twice- or thrice-weekly preoccupation of the media in identifying, decrying, and promoting demonstrations about the latest episode of a white police officer shooting a (preferably underaged) unarmed black citizen. In this country of a third of a billion people, where firearms are so venerated, such incidents are numerous (though less frequent than those of the police shooting unarmed white people, which are not considered newsworthy).

It was clear in the president’s address that he is trying to stretch the tarpaulin over these gaps by maintaining the asinine pretense that the COVID virus still has its fingers at the throat of America, even his twice-vaccinated, multi-masked, socially distanced audience, and by claiming to have redeemed the country from “the brink of the abyss of insurrection and autocracy.” Obviously the Democratic tightrope act will not be sustained by nonsense like this much longer. The weakening Democratic claim on the loyalty of African Americans now depends upon the party’s reputation as being a more enthusiastic distributor of state benefit, and the Republican challenge depends upon the steadily stronger appeal of creating conditions in which African Americans can flourish by combining their own initiative with well-tailored government incentives. Senator Scott’s enterprise zones, like his proposal for reform of police tactics, which the Democrats allowed to expire last summer for fear the Republicans might actually win some votes out of it, have helped to cloud the electoral equation.

The minority of African Americans after emancipation who could vote voted for the party of Abraham Lincoln. The still-reduced number that could vote after millions had migrated from the South to the great cities of the North voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt because of equal, if segregated, treatment in his welfare and workfare programs. They were confirmed as Democrats by Lyndon Johnson’s enactment of comprehensive voting and civil-rights legislation and by some of the Great Society programs. But Richard Nixon ended school segregation, Ronald Reagan pitched low taxes, and Donald Trump lowered them again and, with Senator Scott, organized a flow of investment into underperforming and largely minority areas.

With African Americans as with Hispanics, the Democrats’ appeal has become tenuous and now depends upon the continued toleration by white Democratic voters of their party’s implicit acceptance that the United States is “systemically racist” and was always a racist enterprise. The party elders, including the vice president, are now trying to redefine ”systemic racism” as a system in which some racists live, and they must look forward to the task of selling that to the energetic minority of their supporters spouting malignant pieties about white privilege and exploitation and Critical Race Theory. And as certainly as 2+2 = 4, the white majority in America, and probably the majority of minorities as well, are not going to buy into the theory that most Americans are racists, and the defamation of all the traditions of mainly white America is itself the most unpromising form of racism: persuading the majority to renounce the unexceptionable conduct of their ancestors and themselves as racist. It is all nonsense and will be generally reviled as nonsense by almost everyone within a year or so.

Senator Scott was attacked as an “Oreo” and ”Uncle Tim,” but even the big social-media platforms had to stop the hysterical abuse of him by frightened Democrats and got it off their platforms within 8 to 10 hours. To one whose youth was spent in the relatively august tranquility of the Eisenhower years, when there was no response to the president and the president’s ability to address the nation was never challenged or abused, it was gratifying finally to see an opposition response that struck home and unmasked the giant fraud of the current Democratic Party.

In the sweepstakes for what should be the much sought-after and very promising Republican presidential nomination in 2024, President Trump runs first if he wants it, but he will still be carrying a good deal of baggage. Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas’s Governor Greg Abbott, and senators Tom Cotton (Arkansas) and Josh Hawley (Missouri) are the most obvious candidates. But Scott has demonstrated that he has the ability, as no one else does (as an African American), to reduce the entire Democratic campaign to a shambles of gaslit name-calling and cringeworthy apologia. They demonstrated that they had no response to Scott’s claims, and the response they attempted was so feeble and false that not even the big-media Democratic propaganda machine could keep it up for more than a few hours. Senator Scott exposed the Democrats in their ghastly moral infirmity.