Ted Budd, public-sector union fan. That characterization is the only conclusion one can draw from the right-wing congressman’s regular appearances alongside the boss of the National Border Control Council. This outfit, which I will admit to having been unfamiliar with until it became a prominent trope of Budd’s campaigning, represents thousands of federally employed Border Patrol agents. It is, in other words, a public-sector union–precisely the kind of organization that wingnuts like Budd would refer to as “socialist” if they represented bus drivers or teaching assistants.

I suspect Ted Budd is too dimwitted to notice this very glaring contradiction. But then Budd has hardly distinguished himself as a conservative intellectual, or even a pompous and absurd pseudo-intellectual like Budd supporter Newt Gingrich. Budd prefers crushing things. Monster trucks crushing old lemony automobiles, or the Hero himself draped in the self-given title “liberal agenda crusher.” Smashing things and grinding them down into desiccated piles of scrap is not a notably cerebral activity.

In his fixation on violence and machismo, Budd reflects the broader tenor of discourse in this year’s Republican Senate primary. Ideas have factored minimally as one Republican after another unwound their own yarn about how (and here we encounter Newt again) the “Secular-Socialist Machine” threatens age-old values of God and Country and the very survival of Anglo America as a place where white Christians held ultimate sway on, well, everything. The spiritual core of Trump Republicanism is toxic masculinity. And while some male intellectuals–for instance Picasso–fell into the swamp of male toxicity, hypermasculinity has seldom been able to coexist with a thoughtful and reflective view of human life.

While Ted Budd’s testosterone-inundated bluster takes first place in the ignorance Olympics, fellow Republicans Mark Walker and Pat McCrory have chipped in shares of anti-intellectualism. This should surprise no one in the case of McCrory. As governor, one of the first of McCrory’s national PR disasters came when he told (gambling addict) William Bennett that North Carolina should chuck the liberal arts into the garbage bin so that universities could place “butts in jobs.” Nice vocabulary, Pat. He has now pivoted from deriding college degrees to a shameless and unadorned fixation on “crap” as the chief metaphor for Ted Budd’s political program.

How long ago it seems that North Carolina conservatives boasted intellectuals in their ranks. Former Governor Jim Martin was a chemistry professor with a Princeton doctorate who enjoyed composing his own pieces of classical music. A generation earlier, the conservative Democrat Sam Ervin was perhaps the most intellectually accomplished member of the United States Senate, though his segregationist views brought former Governor Terry Sanford to scorn Ervin’s erudition as the cynical thinking of a “constitutional racist.” These men could never survive in the conservative political culture that prevails on the North Carolina Right today. The populists want proverbial scalps. Ted Budd is only too eager to start “crushing.”

Alexander H. Jones

Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.