Sarah Palin flashes a thumbs up as she begins to address a crowd during a stop of the Tea Party Express on Boston Common in April.Charles Krupa/The Associated Press
Historical memory might be on the wane elsewhere, but it is very much alive in South Carolina, whose expansive cotton fields and stately plantations memorialize the paradox of a genteel civilization built on slavery and segregation. So the world perked up this week to news that Tim Scott, an African American, won a Republican senatorial primary there over Paul Thurmond, son of the late Strom Thurmond, the fabled segregationist who served from 1956 to 2003.
Few politicians better symbolize the hypocrisy and rigidness of the Old South than Strom Thurmond. While his son's defeat by a black candidate may be seen as racial progress, many ironies are built in: Mr. Scott, who was endorsed by the Tea Party movement and Sarah Palin, won by presenting himself as a more conservative alternative.
In the wake of Barack Obama's victory, Republicans are fielding far more non-white candidates than ever before, many of them far to the right.
"The minority candidates being promoted by the conservative movement all seem to be hard-core ideologues," Ed Kilgore of the website Democratic Strategist tells me by e-mail. "Tim Scott was actually co-chairman of Strom's last Senate campaign." So the real story may be that Strom Thurmond's spiritual son defeated his biological one.
Other Republican candidates include Asian Americans such as Nikki Haley (who won the S.C. gubernatorial primary after a campaign filled with accusations of infidelity and of faking her religious conversion) and Van Tran, African Americans such as Star Parker and Bill Randall and Hispanics such as Robert Enriquez and Susana Martinez.
Many of these candidates come from the frothier, Tea Party side. Discussing the recent adoption of gay marriage in Washington, Ms. Parker said: "It should concern every American as we watch our nation's capital city transform officially into Sodom." Mr. Randall has suggested that the White House and BP deliberately conspired to create the Gulf oil leak.
Fielding minority candidates is a matter of survival. Since the adoption of the "Southern Strategy" in the 1960s, Republicans have had a hard time winning votes from non-whites. In 2008, Mr. Obama won 95 per cent of the black vote, 67 per cent of Hispanics and 62 per cent of Asians. Every Republican senator is white, as are the overwhelming majority of other Republican elected officials. In an increasingly diverse nation, their future could be bleak.
But is it enough to run minority candidates if they have policies that most non-whites would disagree with? "Much of the racial gesturing and symbolism that we see from the Republicans … is designed as much to appeal to moderate white voters as it is to non-white voters," argues Thomas F. Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland. "Though it is of course easier to identity and recruit the occasional non-white candidates for office here and there, the way to get minority votes is to support policies that racial minorities want."
Rutgers University historian David Greenberg agrees: "It may or may not win over voters who are themselves minorities, or women, but … it might very well help dispel bad associations the party has among independent or swing voters, as a bastion of backward-looking, self-satisfied white men."
Reihan Salam, a writer for the conservative National Review and the son of Bangladeshi immigrants, disputes the impression of tokenism. He argues it is a grassroots phenomenon: Asians who have immigrated to small or rural areas, for example, are likely to share their neighbours' conservative values.
The stormy rise of Ms. Haley illustrates the dangers here. She was born Nimrata Randhawa, the daughter of Sikh immigrants, and grew up in South Carolina. When she married her husband, Michael Haley, they had both a Sikh and a Methodist ceremony.
This sort of syncretic, mix-and-match religiosity is common to cross-cultural marriages but hard to explain in political terms, so Ms. Haley has had to emphasize the sincerity of her Christian conversion. Yet she was still the target of racial and religious bigotry during her campaign.
"We've already got a raghead in the White House. We don't need another raghead in the governor's mansion," said legislator Jake Knotts, who later claimed it was a joke.
Nonetheless, Ms. Haley displayed a great deal of political moxie in the campaign.
"I think part of this goes well beyond affirmative action," notes Mark Schmitt, editor of the liberal American Prospect. "A lot of these candidates are really good spokespeople for the Republican/libertarian worldview, because they have that self-made person's belief that if they can make it, anyone can. … giving them a totally different way of talking about the world than, say, the grumbly Joe the Plumber."
But Ms. Haley's life shows that there is a downside to any triumphalist narrative of immigrant success. Having reinvented themselves, Gatsby- like, some immigrants embrace a radical individualism that denies the communal and social obligations that are an essential part of human life. The self-made man or woman can be full of scorn for those who don't make it.
Mr. Salam notes that politicians who have mixed ethnic identities are often forced to "cohere" behind one - as Mr. Obama has done with blackness. Still, it seems unlikely a Republican Sikh, Hindu or Muslim will run successfully any time soon. While the GOP may be becoming multiracial, the leaders of the party are still mono-cultural.