Where is the Backlash Against NC REpublican Authoritarianism?

by | Nov 4, 2021 | Politics | 4 comments

North Carolina’s frontier origins bred a resistance to overweening authority. The earliest Euro-Americans to settle in the state were small farmers who could no longer afford land in the colony of Virginia, and so spilled across the border into the Albemarle region to erect a new society with rough social equality and a fiercely held norm of individual freedom. About a century later, backcountry farmers rebelled against the eastern North Carolina grandees in a civil conflict that would later be called the Regulator War. When the time came to draft a state constitution, the state’s framers created a governing pact that minimized central authority in favor of a diffuse governmental structure.

North Carolinians’ resistance to authority played an important role in driving white voters into the Republican Party, favorably disposed as they were to the Republicans’ message of limited government and lower taxes. (Of course, race was the principal reason for the pro-GOP trend.) But in a rich historical irony, the social value that sent so many conservative North Carolinians into the GOP seems to have been vacated as their chosen party seeks to impose an authoritarian pseudo-democracy.

The NCGOP’s proposed legislative maps would rig North Carolina elections as effectively as Vladimir Putin’s sham elections in Russia. Regardless of what happens in the popular vote, Republicans will hold at least 10 and possibly 11 of the state’s 14 Congressional seats. Even close observers may not know that Democrats won the popular vote for United States House in North Carolina last year. So, directly contravening the desires of the people, Republican mapmakers have sought to create a delegation that does not reflect popular will at all. The elections are, simply, rigged.

Yet popular discontent seems muted at best. North Carolinians who have resisted imposed authority for more than 12 generations are raising minimal objections to a process that is corrupt, shameless, and deeply autocratic. The NCGOP has demonstrated its intention to usurp North Carolinians democratic birthright, establishing an electoral landscape that stymies any effort to elect congresspeople who reflect the desires of the state’s constituents rather than those of the mapmakers, and the only concerted resistance seems to come from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which has already sued.

Partly this lethargy owes to the sinister power of negative partisanship. Many of the North Carolina voters who have been most fiercely opposed to authority are Republicans, and with their fear and hatred of the Democratic Party having remained a fever pitch for over a decade, they may be willing to tolerate an assault on democracy if it keeps the left out of power. On the other hand, Democratic voters may feel defeated. They knew that the legislature’s redistricting warlocks would cast a dark spell on congressional elections. So far, as the process has gone forward as expected.

The Regulators wept.

4 Comments

  1. phoenix

    Democrats have reaped what they Sown. Don’t whine about a system you put in and were warned about doing.

    Liberty and freedom are best in the hands of Republicans.

    Too bad so sad for Democrats. Maybe if they learn to serve rather than rule it will change. But when you look down on people and tell them they are too stupid for their own good don’t be surprised when they reject you for someone more reasonable if not outright better for them.

    Don’t worry some day it will go the other way.

    However may that day be a long long long time away. Until then work on your game.

    Democrats are dangerous to freedom, liberty, and the economy you don’t have to look very hard to see it.

    I suggest Democrats go to democrat areas Like (CA, NJ, NY, etc..) and work their magic there and leave the American in NC alone.

    They have nothing we need and plenty more we don’t want

  2. Andy Stevens

    Elections have consequences. However, once again, the author fails to point out the nearly 140 years of Democrat one party rule in North Carolina and THEIR creation of the snake like 12th Congressional District, stretching like a slithering snake from Charlotte to nearly the Virginia border.

    What a revisionist rewrite of history once again.

    • Bobby Padgett

      Rigged elections have no consequences. Since Art Pope bought the legislature in 2010, the GOP has run roughshod over the will of the voters in NC and safely ensconced in the districts drawn to protect them have little reason to do so.

  3. Becky Mock

    Sharing!!!

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