The real legacy of Phil Berger and Thom Tillis

They unleashed a wave of ugly populism that had been kept at bay for 50 years.

With Phil Berger and Thom Tillis both exiting the stage at the same time, they and their supporters are trying to define their legacies. Berger fans were all over Twitter praising him for what he did for North Carolina. Tillis told PBS about what amazing things the two of them did when Republicans took over the legislature.

To hear them tell it, North Carolina was a liberal bastion, swimming in high taxes and struggling to get by. It’s all a myth. They certainly changed the state, but most of it was around dismantling our public education and university system while shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class.

Republicans took power in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression. North Carolina got hit especially hard because of its reliance on manufacturing. Instead of offering much stimulus, Republicans cut taxes. Our recovery was slower than that of our neighbors.

For years, Democrats warned that if the GOP got control of the state, they would cut funding to public education. Republicans screamed that we were using scare tactics. Then, when they won the legislature and governor’s office, they did just that.

Once they were in control in Raleigh, they started a Big Lie. “Public schools are broken!” they cried. Then they went about the business of breaking them. They slashed per pupil spending and cut teacher pay. Where North Carolina traditionally sat near the middle of the country in those rankings, today we’re at the bottom of the barrel. When Republicans cry that our public schools are broken today, you can thank 15 years of GOP budgets for that.

They did the same thing to the university system. When they took power, they cut per pupil spending on university students by almost half. The people who were hit hardest were those least able to afford it.

Those weren’t scare tactics. They were warnings and today they’ve come true.

Of course, to fix the schools they broke, they’re continuing to shift tax dollars out of public schools to subsidize private ones. When they first implemented their voucher scheme, Republicans swore they were trying to give poor kids the resources to escape failing public schools. Within just a few years, though, they lifted the income cap and much if not most of that money flows to families who were already affluent enough to afford private education.

The voucher program was really just a scheme to keep cutting taxes for the wealthiest and shifting the tax burden to the poorest North Carolinians. After Republicans flattened the income tax and expanded the sales tax, the state is essentially upside down. The top 1% pay only about 6% of their income in taxes while the lowest 20% pay about 10.5%. Republicans call that a fair tax.

Revenue in the state has grown at a relatively healthy 2.6% since the Great Recession but it grew by an average of 8% a year in the 35 years prior to Republican rule. I’ll grant them that the 1990s were especially generous boom years and the recession changed the equation, but they haven’t done anything spectacular — other than reducing the tax burden for rich people.

Republicans like to crow about their economic success, but they haven’t done anything amazing. The state is essentially on the same trajectory it was on when Democrats ran the state, just without the support of public education. Since the tax restructuring, GDP in the state has grown at about the same pace as it did during the years immediately preceding the Great Recession — about 2.5%-3%. Those are solid numbers, but there’s no evidence that North Carolina was struggling economically under its previous progressive tax system.

Income in North Carolina increased nominally but not exceptionally. We basically tracked the national average and trailed our neighbors. That’s nothing to brag about.

What Republicans did really well was cause division in the state. For decades, the state navigated sticky social and cultural divides better than most of our neighbors. Thom Tillis and Phil Berger decided to exploit them. They put Amendment One on the ballot. They passed HB2. They added strict abortion limits. They used modern tools to gerrymander the state more than any other in the nation, long before the redistricting wars playing out today.

They exploited the rural-urban divide with a steady stream of bald-faced lies that gave them political power at the expense of a unified state. They told people that our schools were broken when they weren’t. They claimed there was rampant voter fraud when it was almost nonexistent. They swore Democrats were coming for their guns when nobody was doing that. They did little to disabuse their base of the lie that COVID was a hoax and the vaccine was dangerous. They callously watched infection and death rates among Republicans dwarf those of Democratic areas because they didn’t want to contradict the lies coming out of the White House and they opposed mask mandates.

The lying all came to a head during Hurricane Helene. Instead of coming together to help people in dire straits, they allowed disinformation to proliferate, damaging the recovery effort and fomenting distrust of the government agencies that were there to help.

Republicans didn’t improve our state economically. It was already one of the fastest growing in the nation and routinely rated one of the best states for business. They didn’t significantly increase incomes. In fact, the people who support them in rural communities have watched theirs fall. They didn’t improve our standing in the country. They sullied our reputation with culture wars and anti-democratic policies.

Their single biggest accomplishment was unleashing an ugly populism that moderate policies had kept at bay since the end of the Civil Rights Movement. They made bigotry great again in the name of free speech. They blamed immigrants for taking jobs and costing taxpayer money when in reality they are a net benefit to our economy and often the only thing propping up rural communities. They brought clowns into a Subway in Raleigh, brandishing guns and dressed in militia gear.

That’s their legacy. It took more than sixty years to beat the populists back from about the turn of the 20th century until the Civil Rights Era. It may take that long again. This time, the North Carolina populists were the vanguard of the national movement that became MAGA. You can thank Thom Tillis and Phil Berger.