It's Not Me, It's You

During his remarks, Scott said the nation was "standing at a time for choosing: victimhood or victory? Grievance or greatness? I choose freedom and hope and opportunity."

Tim Scott, the next White House hopeful

Scott criticized Democrats on a number of issues, like education and public school funding.

"They're more interested in keeping those kids trapped in their schools and trapped out of their futures," Scott said.

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Maybe it's just me, but accusing Democrats of having an interest in poor education and poor life outcomes for people sure seems like indulging in grievance to me. What other point is there to calling out people as actively working against the interests of the public other than to stoke a sense of grievance?

It’s also not clear whether voters will buy Scott’s message of unity and forgiveness at a time of hyper-political polarization.

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If Senator Scott is the voice of forgiveness and unity, I'm pretty sure that those concepts have lost most, if not all, of their meaning.

But I do find it interesting how the steady drumbeat of partisanship has changed how people see the world. Senator Scott's message is viewed as a positive one, despite, as one would expect from a Republican office-holder, the open attacks on Democrats. Writing for FiveThirtyEight, Alex Samuels notes: "His vision is relentlessly optimistic, an implicit rebuke of the grievance politics that have taken over the Republican Party — though it’s unclear if the party wants to pivot in his direction." Partisan grievance has become so commonplace that it's effectively invisible. Senator Scott limiting his complaints to an opposing political party, rather than the world at large, is seen as unusually optimistic in a candidate for President.

Personally, I tend to lump Senator Scott in with the long list of other hopeless candidates for the Republican nomination. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have a shot at it, but I suspect that the only way that Donald Trump doesn't make it into the general election in eighteen months is that he drops dead (or is otherwise knocked out of the race due to health or age) between now and then. But stranger things have happened, so it's very premature to write him off now. I have to admit that I don't normally pay much attention to the actual details of how candidates run their campaigns, as it's taken on a "if you've seen one, you've seen them all" flavor over the past few cycles. But if Senator Scott (or anyone else, for that matter) manages to make it past Donald Trump, he's going to be faced with the need to walk back some of his comments about people who aren't fellow Republicans, while not giving those fellow Republicans reason to believe that he's bowing out of the fights they want to pick. That job might be made easier by people's lack of enthusiasm for President Biden, but the challenge will still be there.

Senator Scott's basic message, as I understand it, is a simple one. The United States has enough opportunity to offer everyone. Policies that make opportunities more available to Black Americans and others who have been historically left out will allow them to improve their material conditions substantially and rapidly, such that policies of wealth transfer, which Senator Scott finds fundamentally unfair, won't be necessary and the lingering effects of past discrimination will be completely erased. Like most Republicans, he buys into the idea that the Democratic Party is too wedded to ideas of paternalism and control to implement policies that would result in less neediness on government programs. And there's nothing wrong with this messaging, for the most part. I take exception to the idea that half of the nation's political establishment is actively malicious, but it's a concept that's not going anywhere. Presuming that he actually has to answer questions about it, where I think that Senator Scott is going to have a hard time winning over skeptics is in actually pointing to areas in which Republicans have managed to create the post-scarcity society he talks about. Republican orthodoxy has long been concerned with increasing the size of the pie by growing the largest slices, even at the direct expense of the smaller ones, and I suspect that Senator Scott is going to be left needing to blame Democrats for his inability to produce concrete examples of the prosperity that he claims is there for the taking. And it's hard to keep partisan grievance from becoming personal grievance.

Donald Trump's path to fame and political achievement was a simple one: find a fight, and then openly support one side or the other. And in situations where this wasn't a workable strategy, he foundered. Senator Scott appears to want to avoid that, but the route that he seems to taking will, in fact, lead him right through there. Saying that the Democratic Party is full of people who would rather be in power than work for the prosperity of the nation as a whole is one thing. But I've had a lot of conversations with partisans in my day, and it doesn't take long for them to question what sort of person votes for a bad politician. Soon, the idea that Democratic voters are inappropriately irrational, gullible or deliberately Evil takes hold, and the grievances become personal again. Whether Senator Scott is ignoring this, or believes that he can somehow head it off I don't know. But I suspect that it will undermine him, presuming he manages to climb very high with it in the first place.