Are We Just Enjoying A Respite Before Trump Ends American Democracy?
Looking back on today from the vantage point of the future, Americans may see January 6 not as a culmination but as a preview. The Biden administration came as a profound relief for millions of Americans and indeed the world, but forces at work deep in the bowels of...
Will Pat McCrory Get Pawlenty’d?
It is hard now to remember how promising Pat McCrory's political career once appeared. The young mayor of Charlotte, McCrory entered statewide politics with freshness and verve, battling incumbent Lieutenant Governor Bev Perdue to a near tie in the 2008 governor's...
The NC GOP economic development strategy: Outdated and underperforming
We’ve now got a solid ten years of Republican rule in North Carolina and we can do some comparing. The GOP likes to portray North Carolina as a struggling state that had difficulty attracting industry and good paying jobs because of its lousy business climate. In...
Ignorant cancel culture
Up in Surry County, the local GOP leadership is making fools of itself. The county board of commissioners passed a ban on Coke machines on county property to show those bigwigs down in Atlanta that they weren’t taking lightly the company’s opposition to Georgia’s...
Rambling thoughts about family and a rant against Braxton Bragg
My mother's family came to America as part of the migration of lower-class Britons into Pennsylvania, down through the Shenandoah Valley and finally to the back countries of Carolina and beyond. They came as indentured servants, and by the eve of the Civil War they...
Republicans’ ultra-conservative budget target is a nonstarter
The dramatic shift in North Carolina's political dynamics that took place in 2018 has not been paralleled by a change in the Republican mindset. The GOP has grumpily decided to attempt continued one-party rule in the face of a governor who has popularity and the...
Trump disses McCrory, upends #NCSEN
Donald Trump sure does love to make news. Giving his first public speech since ignominiously exiting the national stage in January, the former president electrified North Carolina politics. He endorsed Ted Budd in the state's Republican primary for U.S. Senate,...
Voter suppression, not voter ID, is the big problem
Here’s my unpopular opinion for the week: Democrats should concede on voter ID and work to make them as accessible as possible and to make exceptions for those who have extreme difficulty getting them. Republicans are using voter ID as a screen and it’s working....
A decade of decline
A top scientist turned down a job at UNC-CH because the Board of Trustees refused to offer tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones. Lisa Jones, a prominent chemist, turned down an offer at UNC, writing, “The news this week that Nikole Hannah-Jones was denied tenure was very...
The danger of Fortress Liberalism
I got barbecued for yesterday's post about the 100-county campaign. That's okay. Politics will always entail lively debate, and Sen. Jackson has an enthusiastic following on social media that I fully expected to come to his defense. No bloggers were harmed in the...
The folly of a 100-county campaign
If the Democratic Party is to regain its status as North Carolina's majority faction, it must represent all the people in the state. Too many North Carolinians have come to view the party as an Other, a monstrous, unknowable alien entity which they do not understand...
It all started here
Yesterday, a group of 100 scholars issued a statement saying that our democracy is at risk. This weekend, Texas tried to pass a voter suppression law that would restrict access to the ballot and allow officials to overturn election results based on accusations of...