History’s Election and North Carolina

By GENE NICHOL

The 2020 election, for me, brings to mind a famed F. Scott Fitzgerald quote. In a 1936 Esquire essay entitled ‘Cracked Up,’ Fitzgerald said “the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” I’m working on it.

First, of course, there is the presidential election. After a scary opening, the Nov. 3 franchise delivered the most crucial and democracy-affirming verdict experienced in the United States since 1864. Americans of every pedigree and persuasion defied disease, duress and distraction to rescue their national experiment.

Citizens, ultimately, did what vaunted institutions couldn’t manage. The United States Senate had eagerly proven itself grotesque, supine and corrupt. Executive branch toadies and lickspittle enabled every Trumpian transgression. Even military leaders bowed before the tyrant’s nauseating sway. Courts were rendered hapless by a long-embraced blight at the top – political hacks masquerading as justices. The nation’s dominant political party and most of its white evangelical religious leaders demonstrated there was no act too base for their ready embrace in a pitiful quest for power.

But, finally, a committed, courageous and immensely diverse citizenry confronted the budding dictatorship of the vilest president in American history and cast him out. The victory was perhaps made all the more astounding in that it was attributable to no compelling or charismatic leader. Just great hearts from every walk of life. Vote totals unseen in decades. Secured by brave, unbowed, often elderly, poll workers – saying to the bullies and blowhards, “step aside, we’ve got this.” I cannot expect to again see such a miracle in my lifetime. No political class saved America. Believers did. Say glory. And repeat it.

Then there was North Carolina. Most Tar Heels voted for Trump — untroubled by over 200,000 needless deaths and relentless paeans to racism. Republican lawmakers, yet again, maintained their poisonous lock on the statehouse. Political plodders and lathered ideologues replaced able and inspiring supreme court justices. Republicans made gains in Council of State races. A grown-up, thoughtful, and effective Democratic governor, was, thankfully returned. Recent months have taught us that having a stupid governor can, quite literally, get you killed. But, man, Roy Cooper must be lonely.

North Carolinians doubled down on their white Republican governing legislative caucuses – which have delivered the stoutest wars on poor and black people seen in modern times. Our only hesitancy is that we prefer that our racial outrages go unmentioned. The rest of the country may be poised for a systemic reckoning. But we’re happy to re-embrace the Sons of the Confederacy. Just, please, please, don’t talk about it. Someone in Atlanta might notice what we’re actually up to here. The New South, after all, must retain the central, defining component of the Old South. The more things change, they more they must, silently and eternally, remain the same.

So, I find myself unable to meet Fitzgerald’s age-old, defining dictum. Our nation’s greatest democratizing moment and my state’s advancing wallow in southern bigotry are, to be sure, “opposing ideas in the mind.” But the conflict between them crushes our “ability to function.” It’s time to leave 1860 behind. A hundred and 60 years ought to be enough. But apparently it’s not.

Gene Nichol is Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and in 2015 started the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund after the UNC Board of Governors closed the state-funded Poverty Center for publishing articles critical of the governor and General Assembly.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2020

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