Politics & Power Quote by Tim Scott

The line is built like a campaign cudgel: define “progress” as an unquestioned good, then identify a single villain sturdy enough to hit in every speech. Scott’s verb choice, “attack,” is doing double duty. It’s combative enough to signal urgency to a conservative base trained to see Washington as an adversary, but abstract enough to avoid naming the specific programs or agencies that might make the argument messier. “Those things” blurs the target; the next sentence snaps it into focus with a clean scapegoat: “the federal government.”

The subtext is less about governing than about permission. If the federal government is “the thing” obstructing progress, then rolling it back can be framed not as subtraction but as liberation. Scott’s move is to hijack a word often owned by liberals and rebrand it as a conservative project: progress as deregulation, decentralization, market freedom, and a thicker role for states and private actors. That rhetorical flip matters in a moment when the right wants to be seen as forward-looking rather than purely nostalgic.

Contextually, this sits inside the long post-Reagan tradition of anti-Washington conservatism, updated for an era of pandemic-era spending, culture-war fights over education and speech, and frustration with bureaucracy. It’s also strategic for Scott personally: he can sound reformist and optimistic while keeping the policy specifics offstage, letting listeners project their own grievances onto “the federal government” and call it a plan.