The part of North Carolina where I live, quite literally surrounded by prestigious universities, may be one of the most civilized neighborhoods in the South. Our recently retired congressman, David Price, was previously employed as a professor of political science at Duke. A progressive, highly respected leader among House Democrats, Price represented the Fourth District for 17 terms. His late wife Lisa was the state’s most effective activist for gun control, and he was succeeded in office by a Black woman, Valerie Foushee, who defeated her Republican opponent by a 2-1 margin. The Fourth is not Trump country, and it never will be. But we’re beginning to feel more and more isolated from the rest of the Tar Heel state, where Republicans have established veto-proof majorities in the legislature and elected a gun store owner to the US Senate. And in 2024 they’re offering us some of the strangest candidates in the entire political landscape.
It was only a matter of time before the national media woke up to the bizarre career of our lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, currently the Republican candidate for governor and the target of many recent articles expressing frank amazement. That Robinson is the most rightwing candidate to run for governor since we said good-bye to Jim Crow is hard to dispute. He first gained attention as an opponent of all gun control and all abortions. Among the groups who have suffered his contempt are Jews, homosexuals, transsexuals, women who vote, school shooting survivors (“silly little immature media prosti-tots”?), and African-American communities who protest police violence. He has quoted Hitler on Facebook and rejects any separation of church and state.
None of this should be a big surprise in today’s South where, after a moderate half-century that produced the anti-racist Presidents Johnson, Carter and Clinton, we seem to be slipping back in the direction of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond. None of it would be a surprise except for one fact: Mark Robinson is a Black man. How he came to be, and came to be what he is, is not the easiest thing for me to explore. In these racially-charged times, a White man hesitates to judge a Black man who defies conventional wisdom. “You haven’t walked a mile in his shoes,” his supporters would tell me.
I haven’t, I couldn’t. All I know is that there’s no one an armed White nationalist loves more than an African American who echoes his rhetoric and his obsessions. Remember those passionate Republican crushes on the pizza magnate Herman Cain and the neurosurgeon Ben Carson? In between criminal court appearances, Donald Trump himself came to embrace and endorse Robinson, and salute him as “Martin Luther King on steroids” — surely one of the weirdest compliments ever conceived in the hazardous waste dump that serves Trump for a brain.
It’s possible that Robinson is just an odd duck and a troubled soul. Anyone whose favorite audiences are gun clubs and evangelical churches embodies so many contradictions that logic throws up its hands. But I can forgive myself for guessing that he might be a shameless opportunist who seized his chance to hitch a ride to (relative) riches with these crazy White Republicans. North Carolina’s executive mansion would be a stunning career upgrade for a furniture factory worker with no evident qualifications for public office. It doesn’t seem unfair when the late-night comedians mock him as a “Black White supremacist.” Of course, the state of North Carolina takes a painful satirical beating, along with our unlikely candidate for governor.
And I’m afraid we deserve it. On the same ballot with Mark Robinson, voters will find a woman named Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee for state superintendent of schools. Morrow, a registered nurse who home-schools her children, calls the public schools she hopes to supervise “socialist indoctrination centers.” On Jan. 6, 2021 she joined the mob outside the US Capitol who rioted to overturn the election of Joe Biden. When CNN examined her history of social media posts, they found conspiracy theories, QAnon slogans and alarming fantasies about executing Biden, Barack Obama and N.C. Governor Roy Cooper.
“I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of a firing squad,” she wrote of President Obama. “We could make some money back from televising his death.” She used the social media hashtag #DeathtoTraitors.
This is the woman a majority of North Carolina Republicans would put in charge of their children? We realize that there’s no one like Ms. Morrow in Massachusetts or New Jersey, at least no one winning primaries. The wild creatures who drift in from the Far-Right reaches of Southern politics strain belief, and North Carolina suffers more than our share. There’s no limit, especially when the ‘‘evangelicals” weigh in. In Monroe, N.C. — Jesse Helms’ hometown — a Baptist minister named Bobby Leonard declared from his pulpit that rape should be legal if the victim was wearing shorts. “If I’m on the jury he’s gonna go free,” Rev.Leonard told his congregation. “Because a man’s a man.”
Leonard apologized, unconvincingly, when the Internet went wild and even the governor denounced him. We have learned to live with our embarrassment. But Mark Robinson is in a special category of concern, because he could actually win his election and expose us to national contempt. He could win because the White Republicans are locked down in their affection for an apparently captive Black man, and because many Black voters might vote their hearts instead of their brains. The idea of a Black governor ruling the roost in Raleigh might be hard to resist, in a state where your ancestors were enslaved. Our rolls must include at least a couple of living voters whose grandparents were born slaves, and many whose great-grandparents were born before Emancipation.
This might be a powerful incentive to vote Republican, against your better judgment. I read recently that 80% of America’s registered voters pay little attention to the issues and candidates, even in a presidential year. An ignorant voter is an impulsive one; ignorance and stupidity are always part of the electoral equation. Yet most Black voters must understand that the modern Republican Party is closer to the KKK than the NAACP, since the Republican share of the Black vote rarely rises much above 10%. But that share has been rising in recent polls, even as the GOP swings further Right. When Mark Robinson shakes Trump’s puffy little hand, is he aware that this is a confirmed racist who joined the anti-Obama Birther cult, who lobbied for capital punishment for the Central Park Five, Black teenagers convicted of gang rape and fully exonerated after serving years in prison? Whose companies in New York accumulated thousands of complaints of racial discrimination?
When Trump and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, took control of the Republican National Committee in March and purged it of non-flunkies, the first wave of layoffs closed the “minority outreach” community centers that were established to court Black voters. The same week, with his typically uncanny insensitivity, the ex-president boasted to a Black audience that Black people love him because he is, like them, always in trouble with the law. Is Robinson aware of all this? In other words, is he a cynic on the make or a near-idiot like Trump? Don’t we wish we knew? Of course the ultimate liberal fantasy is that Robinson will win, then tear off his MAGA disguise, scream “Gotcha!” at the Republican National Committee and reveal himself as the civil rights hero, the modern-day Dr. King North Carolina sorely needs. But we’re not holding our breath.
The Black columnist Charles Blow argues cogently that Black voters have an equal right to lean conservative, and to vary as much as Whites in their political allegiances. Fair enough. But The Party That Trump Ate is hardly conservative anymore. It’s controlled by radicals who call themselves populists. They’re actually White nationalists, a brand of nativism that’s racist to its roots. You saw the swastikas and the Confederate battle flags on Jan. 6, 2021. If the United States of America was the country many of us thought and hoped it was, the MAGAfied Republican Party would be as bankrupt politically as it is morally and intellectually. Its candidates would be rejected so decisively that it would be forced to disband, or at least re-form into something more mainstream and reasonable. But that’s not the country we live in today. A venerable party that was an integral part of the American political system has morphed into a mortal danger to that system, and to the democracy it proclaims.
My friend Gene Nichol, the writer and legal scholar who serves as the liberal conscience of the Fourth Congressional District, states our crisis urgently, describing the Trump/Robinson alliance as “this partnership of hate and constitutional rejectionism.” He labels MAGA Republicans “the sedition caucus,” no exaggeration to my ear. If Trump is elected president and Mark Robinson is elected governor, the sane, orphaned progressives of the Fourth District—-and our brothers and sisters statewide — will find ourselves as close to Hell as people like Pastor Leonard and the homicide-haunted Nurse Morrow always said we were headed. God help us.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2024
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