The GOP, an increasingly extremist party whose members still can’t all admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, has a message for Joe Biden: Stop being so radical and divisive. That was the gist of Senator Tim Scott’s rebuttal to the president’s first address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night. Painting Biden’s calls for unity as “empty platitudes,” the South Carolina Republican accused Democrats of dividing Americans in pursuit of a far-left agenda, and of abandoning GOP lawmakers who sincerely want to come together to advance common-sense legislation. “We need policies and progress that bring us closer together,” Scott said. “But three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart.”
As a thesis, it was fundamentally dishonest. But it was also telling: Lacking a serious and coherent agenda of their own, and under the spell of a wannabe-strongman, Republicans’ response to Biden is to misrepresent him as they open up new fronts in the culture wars. Sure, at times on Wednesday night Biden seemed moments away from breaking into “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”—but, Republicans want Americans to believe, that’s just a front for a fringe agenda that has, in the words of Scott, helped push the nation “off its shared foundation.” Or, as Ted Cruz summed up Biden’s address: “Boring, but radical.”
They’re not wrong that the ambition of the agenda the administration has pushed in its first 100 days can sometimes be overlooked because its point man is, well, Joe Biden; it can be hard to wrap your head around the fact that the guy bullshitting about golf with John Boehner is putting forth one of the most unabashedly progressive platforms in recent history. But his project isn’t to make crazy ideas seem normal, as Republicans contend; it’s to make the case for what should be normal. Polls suggest he’s doing just that: a CNN survey after his address Wednesday found that nearly three-quarters of viewers believed the policies Biden proposed would move the country in the right direction; a CBS News poll came in with similar results, with 85% of respondents saying they approved of the speech and as many or more describing what they saw as “inspiring,” “caring,” and “presidential.” The country may be bitterly polarized, but a majority approve of Biden and his policies—especially compared with his predecessor.
So where does that leave Republicans, who are still at the mercy of the former guy? Apparently, hoping that Americans scare easily and have a short memory. Scott opened his rebuttal by dinging Biden for failing to “lower the temperature”—without mentioning who it was, exactly, that raised it (maybe the president who sicced armed supporters on the Capitol in response to his election loss?). Next, he suggested that Biden—who assumed office at the worst point of the COVID crisis, with a sputtering vaccine rollout—is wrongly taking credit for the improved pandemic outlook in the U.S., arguing that the progress he’s attributing to his own administration actually began under Trump. “Too often,” Scott said without a hint of irony, “powerful grown-ups set science aside.” Finally, Scott took aim at several “partisan” items on the Biden agenda, all without saying anything substantive about what made them so radical or what solution Republicans would prefer. The premise throughout: that Democrats are seeking to foist their agenda on the country by dividing it.
That point was made most directly in the most eyebrow-raising line of the response, which came as Scott—the only Black Republican in the Senate—rebuked Biden’s call to address systemic racism. “America is not a racist country,” he said, defending the laws the GOP has enacted or proposed in a barely-veiled effort to curtail voting rights. “It’s backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination. And it’s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.” It was the most contentious line of Scott’s speech, though Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday said she agreed that she doesn’t believe “America is a racist country.” “These are issues that we must confront,” Harris added. “It does not help to heal our country, to unify us as a people, to ignore the realities of that.” Scott, whose lived experience gives him credibility on the subject that his Republican colleagues lack, wasn’t necessarily saying racism doesn’t exist—just that it isn’t baked into the system, and that to suggest it is is its own kind of discrimination. “Kids again are being taught that the color of their skin defines them,” Scott said, riffing on the old “reverse racism” trope, “and if they look a certain way, they’re an oppressor.”
Scott is certainly entitled to his views on the matter. But the implication that recognizing a problem is divisive and working to solve it is radical is absurd. The GOP’s approach to this and other issues may satisfy the culture warriors among them, for whom the very suggestion that something in this country needs fixing is an egregious attack. But for most Americans facing these issues, who have watched for four years as Trump and his party either ignored or exacerbated them, perhaps the idea of Biden investing billions in child care costs won’t be seen as a Trojan horse for a radical socialist takeover, but as something that will tangibly improve their lives.
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