With a pandemic ravaging the state and thousands of unemployed people ill-served by a safety net his own party has shredded, Mark Robinson picked his issue. Earlier this week, the new lieutenant governor launched a petition to block the implementation of a modified social studies curriculum. The new guidelines departed from Robinson’s conception of American identity, so he went to the barricades against them.

As an aside, Oklahoma got there first. Last year, the Sooner state required that students be taught about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. North Carolina, the site of an even more egregious racial travesty in the 1898 Wilmington coup, was playing catch up with a state so red that Republicans have won every county there since the year 2000. Oklahoma also expanded Medicaid. Under the rule of Republicans like Robinson, our state is less progressive than Oklahoma.

Anyway. Robinson’s determination in the face of a pandemic to rile up his base with the specter of Howard Zinn is highly instructive. Like his his colleagues Dan Bishop and Madison Cawthorn, Robinson represents the takeover of the North Carolina Republican Party by right-wing populists. Though dogmatic on taxes and spending, they emphasize flamboyant gestures toward the anger and resentment of their base and make little effort to improve the lives of people in the state. This trend began earlier in the decade.

In 2013, state Senator Tom Apodaca declared that “cities are getting too big and arrogant.” His Senate colleagues had previously torn up Raleigh’s lease of Dix Park on the grounds that it was a giveaway to rich elitists. The legislature would continue raging against urban elites and attacking their cities for years. And when HB2caused companies around the world to punish the state with boycotts, North Carolina Republicans took a populist stance, with then-Governor Pat McCrory dubbing the boycotting companies, comically, as the “sports and entertainment elite.”

Continuing on this trajectory, North Carolina Republicans became more populist and Trumpist as the Trump era proceeded. Failed gubernatorial candidate Dan Forest adopted a voice-of-the-little-man tone in his fulminations against Roy Cooper’s executive orders. One think tanker aligned with the party labeled the governor “King Cooper.” And the trend was consummated when a poorly educated and congenitally angry young man named Madison Cawthorn went to Washington.

The NCGOP’s conversion to populism reflects in part their transition from a statewide to a rural, almost exclusively white party. When not offered an economic message, economically stressed white voters have gravitated toward populist figures who allow them to live vicariously with politicized rage. In North Carolina, this tradition was represented for decades by Jesse Helms. The difference between then and now is that Helms-style provocateurs are running state government. Heaven help us.