In 1898, Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina urged a mob of white North Carolinians to murder a Black man and make him “food for the catfish at the bottom of the Cape Fear River.” Those North Carolinians wheeled a Gatling gun into Wilmington and killed over 60 Black people in the way of overturning the city’s government, the only violent coup to take place in American history. The new rulers of the city included the leader of the local Ku Klux Klan, one Alfred Waddell. All of them were aligned with the then-conservative-leaning Democratic Party.

In 2021, Congressman Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina incited a mob of white Americans from across the nation but particularly from the South to advance on the U.S. Capitol building and overthrow the results of a democratic election. The white people mobbed the Capitol, breaking windows and vandalizing offices and injuring Capitol Police and killing five people. The ringleaders of the assault included Proud Boys, the leading right-wing militia group in America and the successors to paramilitary thugs like the Red Shirts and the KKK. Nearly all of them were aligned with Cawthorn’s Republican Party.

The symmetry between the Wilmington Coup and the January 6th insurrection is far from coincidental. In recent years, the United States has witnessed a resurgence of right-wing violence culture. This culture of violence has deep American roots and suffuses much of the political firmament in Donald Trump’s party and movement. The worship of guns, the veneration of obstreperous masculinity, and the willingness to deploy violent tactics to solidify fascistic authoritarianism are all characteristic of the ruling ethos in the GOP.

The culture of violence in America traces its roots to the settlement of the American back-country in the 1700s. Fleeing English persecution, Scots-Irish Britons left the British Isles for Pennsylvania, made their way south to Virginia and the Carolinas, and crossed the Appalachians to form new communities on land stolen from Native Americans. These Scots-Irish (note, that does not mean they were of mixed Scottish and Irish blood; this was a distinct ethnic group) had developed a culture of prickly honor-keeping and hair-trigger brawling. They had to protect their livestock and fought anyone who threatened it, a folkway that eventually metastasized into a culture that was comfortable with the application of human-human violence to settle social differences.

As the Republican Party has become “Southernized,” this Scots-Irish violence culture has taken over conservative politics far from its birthplace in Dixie. Republicans now affect aggression and identify themselves with tools of violence. See the number of campaign ads in which Republican candidates appear with machine guns or pistols prominently displayed on their persons. Senator Tom Cotton held up Andrew Jackson, famous for war crimes and racism enforced by lethal violence, as the spiritual father of the Trumpist GOP. Republican cheered on Donald Trump when he dropped the “Mother of All Bombs” and had an Iranian general killed by a drone strike. Across the landscape of Republican politics, violence consistently rears its head.

As is often the case, political trends writ large appear in North Carolina writ small. Few Republicans cultivate an aura of violence more avidly than Congressman Madison Cawthorn, R-NC. Cawthorn seems to carry a gun everywhere, including on an airplane and in the Capitol rotunda, and he constantly portrays himself carrying and firing weapons. Much of his campaign imagery had him flaunting his arsenal, and of course he played a vital role in inciting the Capitol riot. It’s imperative for North Carolinians who value civilization and peace to eject this young thug from public office.