When South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley appoints Representative Tim Scott to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy made by the departing Jim DeMint, it will have been 32 years since another black Republican took a seat there.

This seems like more of a cause for shame than celebration – and not just for the Republican party, but for Democrats, as well: only five other black men, and one black woman, have ever held office in the nation's upper chamber. At least the Democrats mostly elected theirs – Scott won't just be the third black Republican in the Senate from the American south, he will also be the third to get there without winning the popular vote. Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, both senators from Mississippi in the late 1800s, got to the Hill via election by the state senate.

That said, Scott has a decent chance of holding the seat come November 2016. He won a primary run-off in 2010 against the son of legendary Senator Strom Thurmond by 69-31 margin and has faced only token opposition in the general election (winning by 65-29 in 2010, and 62-36 in 2012). And as his ability to fundraise from outside the state – 20% of his campaign contributions in the last cycle came from outside South Carolina; Washington, DC was the third most generous metro area for him overall – shows Scott is a valuable commodity to a party struggling to remain relevant despite demographic disadvantages and an even more serious reputation deficit.

But a demographic shift among the party's elected officials won't necessarily do anything to change that reputation. Indeed, Scott's elevation to the Senate will leave the GOP without any black representatives in the House; Florida voters forcibly retired Scott's sole counterpart there, Allen West, after his two-year stint as the "congressman most likely to be compared to Joe McCarthy". Ideologically, Scott hews to the same line of here-come-the-socialists-to-steal-our-Christmas thinking that West promoted, but his more staid temperament seems to have kept him out of the spotlight. At a time when Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are mainstream, the fact that Scott only endorsed impeaching Obama, rather than question his citizenship, puts him, if anything, on the leftward edge of the Tea Party.

They need him, of course. Right now, the Tea Party – not the GOP's narrowing center – can claim a surface diversity that its voting population as a whole lacks: along with Scott, there's Haley herself, whose parents immigrated from India; Marco Rubio and Susana Martinez serve as human counterweights to the party's immigration policy that's alienated a historic number of Latinos; insiders regularly promote Representative Cathy McMorris-Rodgers as future national ticket material.

That all these television-friendly personalities garner support from the party's far right base says less about the Tea Party's open-mindedness on diversity than its closed-mindedness on ideology. It's not that only the party's staunchest conservatives will elect minorities; it's that only staunchly conservative minorities can get support – those who are comfortably defanged of opinions that threaten the status quo.

Should Condoleezza Rice ascend in 2016 on the more moderate platform hinted at by her address to the RNC last summer, it will likely be because of the credibility she won via loyalty to the Bush administration. She comes pre-screened as non-threatening, willing to follow the most unpopular of orders.

Scott himself is nothing if not disciplined. His entry into public service stems from a "life matrix" he wrote when he was 17, a plan divided into five-year segments with the end goal "to have a positive effect on the lives of 1 billion people before he dies". His policy positions show the same kind rigidity. Whatever upstart sensibility the Tea Party claims to represent, in office Scott has served the same constituencies and lobbying interests that directed his predecessors.

Almost all of the several dozen pieces of legislation Scott has introduced catered to anti-union or pro-manufacturing groups, the same powers that have made South Carolina one of the most labor-unfriendly and environmentally reckless states in the country for decades. Indeed, if in the next few weeks, you hear a lot about Scott's support for the repeal of Obamacare or for the Paul Ryan budget, that might be because nothing else about his record has anything that defines it as being of this century.

Pouring over one set of bills Scott put forward, I thought I might have found residue of the modern era in the 28 separate items he brought to committee that would have lifted duties and tariffs from a laundry list of chemical imports: N-phenyl-p-phenylenediamine and p-Nitrobenzoic Acid and 1,2-Bis(3-aminopropyl)ethylenediamine, polymer with N-butyl-2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-4-piperidinamine! Surely these newfangled mouthfuls would sound strange to Senator Thurmond, who was born before you could get pasteurized milk at the corner store.

The purpose of the chemical bills, none of which made it to the House floor, would have been familiar enough to Thurmond. They were intended to sabotage the consumer protections of the Cosmetic Safety Amendment Act, allowing manufacturers to stock up on suspect ingredients before restrictions came into effect. And it turns out the chemicals themselves weren't foreign to Thurmond, either: He spent many of his final years in the Senate trying to lift the very same penalties.

There's a postmodern poetry to the Thurmond-Scott chemical bond, and it's not just in the symmetry of suffixes (-ide-mine-tyl-zoic!). Both men championed substances used as "optical whiteners", a flourish even Ralph Ellison might have found overly literal, if apt. As a character in Ellison's Invisible Man says of a similar product, "That's paint that will cover just about anything."