Congressman Pat Harrigan wants to return North Carolina to the 1880s

Congressman Pat Harrigan thinks there are too many immigrants in Charlotte. With swashbuckling confidence, the Green Beret theorized that in a city with a high proportion of foreign nationals, the murder rate could on creep up. He proffered a dismal portrait of the Queen City—and a flattering implicit contrast to constituents in Hickory. Scapegoating cities for the flaws in America is a common trope in populist rhetoric that reveals little of the truth and few solutions for the suffering small town.

In case you didn’t know, Pat Harrigan is a former Green Beret. He has strained to make sure that that part of his biography made an impression on the state’s political community. He is tough, manly. A grizzled warrior bringing his machismo to a world threatened by the decadent malefactors of the Left. He was also born and raised in San Diego, California in the ‘80s and ‘90s, moving to the Tar Heel state only in 2012. This newcomer would like you to believe that the sap of the long leaf pine runs in his veins.

An aside: Phil Berger has been President Pro Tem of the North Carolina State Senate for longer than Pat Harrigan has lived in North Carolina.

At any rate, Congressman Harrigan (R-Hickory) has a distinctly negative view of Charlotte, and immigrants. He argued that a city where one-in-six residents immigrated here from a foreign country was inevitably inviting a plague of violence. Cities where too many people came from the Global South were committing public-safety suicide. The solution is to get the bastards out: Bring in ICE and let the masked enforcers loose on immigrant neighborhoods. Then, with the miscreants safely deported, Charlotte can come to resemble the bucolic wonderland Harrigan moved to.

Like many richly credentialed Republicans, West Point graduate Harrigan is trying to build a career through populist appeals. He sees that the pickings are lush and inviting in white working-class North Carolina, so he is affecting the persona of a Southern populist brawler. With the Manichean starkness common to all populists, Harrigan has portrayed diverse cities as crawling hellholes festering in ugly contrast to the hardworking, law-abiding, Anglo-Saxon workers who make his community great. Cities are the enemy, immigrants are the enemy, and Pat Harrigan stands bravely at the forefront of a campaign to take our country back.

What Nativist schlock! The reality is that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans and Charlotte is the eleventh-fastest-growing city in the country. Harrigan’s argument is disingenuous, but it draws from populist narratives that have lit up rural North Carolina for nearly 150 years.

In the 1880s, a movement of white farmers in the South and Midwest rose up to protest the depredations of industrial capitalism and the assault on the small farm. The Populists, as they were called, leaned strongly left on economic issues but were rock-ribbed white supremacists and Protestant Christian chauvinists. The historian Richard Hofstadter argued that these people were chiefly attempting to halt the country’s urbanization and restore white, rural farming communities to the center of national life. Populism was stronger in North Carolina than in any other Southern state.

The appeal of Populism in North Carolina was understandable. We had more small farms than any other state in the country, and we were one of the most rural and least literate places in the country. Our state elected the only Populist Senator ever to come out of the South. And the brilliant, quirky Anson County product Leonidas L. Polk likely would have been the party’s nominee for president in 1892 if he had not died shortly before the party’s national convention in Chicago.

Pat Harrigan is trying to do for postindustrial North Carolina what the original Populists did for a dying agrarian world. He is portraying immigrant-heavy cities as hives of vice that are unjustly displacing small towns as the focal point of American life. But Harrigan’s populism is even more demagogic than the original Populists’. The Populists of the 19th century wanted to improve the material conditions facing poor white farmers. Harrigan wants to cut Medicaid.

This cynical contradiction has prompted me to reevaluate my thoughts on the politics of the white working class. I had long been skeptical of the “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” thesis, which claims that right-wing Republicans manipulate the white working class into voting against its self-interest. I thought rural whites were more often simply indifferent to economic issues. But here in our state we have an ambitious and opportunistic young politician purveying tripe to get a working-class district to focus more on (mostly imagined) depredations in Charlotte rather than their own poverty. I don’t know what’s the matter with Kansas. I have a clearer idea of what’s wrong with Pat Harrigan’s conscience.