The human consequences of North Carolina's pseudo-democracy

 It has become unfashionable to talk about democracy. The issue failed to take in Joe Biden’s second term. Since then, even intelligent and morally serious commentators like David Brooks have portrayed “democracy” as a sort of haute-bourgeois frivolity, a dinner party issue. The truth, as we are now seeing in North Carolina, is that the reduction of an American state’s self-governance to pseudo-democracy has tangible repercussions. 

I have always thought that the people who belittled concerns over democracy and voting rights were unmindful of the realities of the South. Brooks is one such critic; another, New York-born Jonah Goldberg, has flippantly suggested that voting is too easy in the United States and that our polity would be healthier if Americans had to earn their democracy by sweating a little bit. In the South, democracy is not a game for eating clubs. It is an ongoing and frequently unsuccessful battle occurring against an unrelenting tide of white racism. 

Consider North Carolina, once called a “moderate” Southern state. Our original state Constitution prohibited all women, all Jews and Catholics, and non-property-holding men from voting. The 1836 Constitutional convention finished up the work of disenfranchising Black men, whom the state’s slaveholding founders hadn’t bothered to ban from voting in 1775. In 1898, after a brief experiment in multiracial democracy, the state convulsed in a bloody spasm of violence called the White Supremacy Campaigns that resulted in one-party white Democratic rule for much of the next century. A mob of Red Shirts—the terrorist successors to the first KKK—put an exclamation point on democracy’s death knell by overthrowing Wilmington’s city government, at the point of a Gatling gun. 

Ancient history? No way. After 50 years of uneasy efforts to grasp toward authentic democracy, North Carolina’s political system has curdled into authoritarianism. At this point, nearly all of the power over public policy in our state is concentrated in the General Assembly. Republican gerrymandering has insured that the General Assembly’s GOP majority will never lose power unless a future state Supreme Court bans partisan redistricting. The legislature is constituted—not elected—by bogus pseudo-elections that exchange an incumbent or two on the margins but leave Republicans with large and impregnable majorities. Democratically elected executive-branch officials have had so much power taken from them (by the legislature) that they are mere figureheads, like the ceremonial president of a country run by mullahs. 

Yes, the state does hold meaningless elections. But we are governed by a cohort of white males who rule from the legislative building without any prospect that unpopular policy decisions will result in them being removed from power. The structures of democracy are an empty shell. The North Carolina Republican Politburo determines the direction of state from Capitol Square, minus the parades. 

This situation is not merely a moral disgrace. The GOP’s democracy-proof majorities are implementing policies that will damage the state’s future and the most vulnerable people, its children. Based upon secret negotiations with each other, Republican legislative leaders have announced a budget “framework” (they’re still discussing its final shape, outside of public view of course) that will give teachers a pay raise lower than the rate of inflation and cut taxes for the rich for the ninth time since 2011. 

Already our teachers are toiling at second jobs to eek out enough of a living to pay their rent. The pluckiest ones are fleeing North Carolina for another state where they will not be treated as second-class citizens. With education cuts going through all over the state, the authoritarian legislature’s budget will result in the further atrophy of public schools. One county is closing two elementary schools. Wake County considered (but declined to) lay of over 100 special-needs teachers. And another generation of the state’s children will grow up without the educational opportunities that Speaker Destin Hall (and I) were given by a Democratic legislature in the 1990s. 

The GOP’s long assault on public education has never been popular. Polling has always shown strong support for increasing teachers’ funding and pay. The state seems to have looked favorably on the massive rally that desperate teachers held at the legislative building this month. It doesn’t matter. The legislature has complete freedom to enact unpopular policies because the present redistricting regime guarantees they will never lose power. Desiccated, demoralized education systems and a giant sucking sound pulling state revenues into the pockets of the rich are the consequences of being a pseudo-democracy. This isn’t a dinner party. It’s a state being terribly misruled by forces at odds with American ideals, but in line with Southern realities.