I will never back down in defense of the conservative values that make America exceptional.
— Tim Scott (@votetimscott) April 12, 2023
That's why I'm announcing my exploratory committee for President of the United States.
This fight is personal.
I want every American to have the same opportunities I had. pic.twitter.com/HV56pbyKdB
The Bulwark's Amanda Carpenter is appropriately appalled:
Scott declared his ambition to seek the highest office in the land on Wednesday, April 12, with an ad filmed at Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War rang out 161 years earlier to the day. He wanted people to pay attention to that fateful anniversary....Carpenter is right to draw attention to this, but I don't agree with her when she summarizes Scott's argument as "it’s Joe Biden who is leading a new confederacy that threatens to tear the country apart." This isn't, as Carpenter puts it, "Scott's reframing of Joe Biden as a soul-sucking Jefferson Davis." Scott is saying that Biden is the new Abraham Lincoln -- and that's a bad thing.
Walking past Fort Sumter’s cannons, Scott recalled how when the South Carolina militia fired on the U.S. Army base in 1861, “our country faced the defining moment.” Today, he said, “our country is once again being tested.”
“Once again, our divisions run deep, and the threat to our future is real,” Scott warned. All because “Joe Biden and the radical left have chosen a culture of grievance over greatness.” Scott said the Democrats are “indoctrinating our children to believe we live in an evil country” and weaponizing race to “divide us, to hold on to their power.”
“I know America is a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression,” Scott said. “I know it because I’ve lived it. That’s why it pains my soul to see the Biden liberals attacking every rung of the ladder that helped me climb.”
The right's narrative of race in America goes something like this: The Southern cause in the Civil War was a noble one. Southerners were defending "heritage, not hate." At the same time, slavery was bad -- but it was all the fault of Democrats, so because contemporary right-wing Southerners are Republicans, they're absolved of all blame for slavery. (Recall the recent bill proposed by a Florida lawmaker that would have abolished the state Democratic Party because "the party’s platform has previously advocated for, or been in support of, slavery or involuntary servitude.") The war to defeat slavery is rarely embraced, and there's an implication that slavery somehow disappeared on its own, because True Patriots were prayerful Christians and came to despise slavery as a result. White people don't deserve blame for slavery, they deserve credit for ending it.
According to this narrative, it was Lincoln who was "making everything all about race." America, whose values are most clearly embodied by Southern white conservatives, was perfect in 1861 and is perfect now; the fact that it hadn't eliminated slavery by 1861 was just God working in mysterious ways. (Maybe enslaving Africans for centuries in America was God's way of bringing them to Christ.) Inevitably, slavery disappeared. Its past existence isn't a blot on white Southern conservatives, though it's also a horrendous moral crime on the part of the nineteenth-century Democratic Party, which is identical to the present-day Democratic Party.
It's always liberals who are the meddlesome, intrusive bad guys, and it's always Democrats who are to blame (even though, in 1861, liberals and Democrats were on opposite sides).
Tim Scott didn't go to Fort Sumter because the voters he's pursuing see it as a place where their literal or spiritual ancestors fought to defend their right to continue committing crimes against humanity. Scott went to Fort Sumter because those voters regard it as a place of pride. The enemy, then and now, was a cabal of menacing Northern liberals who want to “divide us, to hold on to their power.”
None of this makes logical sense. But in the reptile brains of right-wingers, it's the gospel truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment