Phil Berger's cruelty theatre

Phil Berger would like to reactivate North Carolina’s electric chair. In an effort to repel Democrats from supporting his new crime bill, the Senate leader inserted an amendment opening the door (to the execution chamber) to more violent methods of killing condemned criminals. It was quite a flourish. Restoring execution methods long discarded as inhumane fits Berger’s model of politics, which one might call Cruelty Theater.

Once relatively moderate, Berger has long been suspecting to have been putting on an act as Senate President Pro Tem. His aggressive, smashmouth, ram-it-through-and-make-Democrats-cry parliamentary maneuvers demonstrate his determination to screw liberals. His legislative style comports with perfect literary decorum with the substance of his agenda. Senator Berger, in his long reign, has emphasized flashy bills on incendiary subjects, with his methods and his policies congealing into an image of rogue masculinity. This is exactly the showmanship his right-wing voters want.

Less-educated white Southerners have always been drawn to political entertainment. In the Jim Crow era of widespread illiteracy, political showmen like Huey Long of Louisiana boasted colorful rhetorical styles and theatrical oratory. Long knowingly misled his constituents (“don’t be a damn fool,” he once said privately after telling a tall tale, “we didn’t even have a horse”). But they appreciated his performative verve. I think one reason Donald Trump has become so popular in the rural South is that he fits nicely into the tradition of politics-as-entertainment that has long been the preferred political style of the Southern white yeomanry.

North Carolina’s less-educated whites have been no different from the cousins deeper South. It’s one of the more arresting historical facts that barbecue, our state’s most beloved culinary tradition, spread across the state during the White Supremacy Campaigns of 1898 and 1900. Racist political crusaders held barbecue picnics where such orators as Charles Aycock raged against “Black domination” to the delight of the illiterate crowds. Barbecue’s popularity lasted. So did bigoted political entertainment.

And this is the kind of show, drenched in white ethnic chauvinism and political demagoguery, that Phil Berger offers to the noncollege whites in his base. His cast of characters, if you will, fits the part. Berger has long surrounded himself with white-male bullies. Over the years, his leadership team has featured masculine hard-liners like Tom Apodaca of Henderson County and Jerry Tillman of Randolph. The longest-serving lieutenant has been Ralph Hise, a warrior with the physique of a daisy bomb who sponsors much of Berger’s most inflammatory legislation. The scene is one of a white-male Republican majority trampling the Black, female, liberal, and urban Democrats on the other side. It’s brute force, Southern-fried.

“Let me breathe!” cried an inmate when a malfunctioning electric chair failed to kill him right away. The death penalty is grotesque and anathema in most civilized countries. As North Carolina academic and former Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Michael Munger noted, “the death penalty is an outrage against decency.” Phil Berger is attempting to use the bloody business of executions to get himself through a difficult primary election. Cruelty theater descends lower into cynicism and ugliness.