Tim Scott did the impossible at last week’s Republican debate: He made me nostalgic for the politics of President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
This was not the intent of South Carolina’s junior senator, as he condemned LBJ for creating programs during the 1960s that continue to undermine the very people they promised to help. “Black families survived slavery,” Scott said. “We survived poll taxes and literacy tests. We survived discrimination being woven into the laws of our country. What was hard to survive was Johnson’s Great Society, where they decided to put money – where they decided to take the black father out of the household to get a check in the mail. And you can now measure that in unemployment, in crime, in devastation.”
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