North Carolina: A State of Shock

[WorseBeforeBetter]

Dan T. Carter, University of South Carolina

Introduction

What is happening in North Carolina? It's a question I've been asked by friends and colleagues around the country as they read the list of far-right legislation that has been coming out of Raleigh over the last six months. Is it as bad as it looks, they want to know?

My answer is always the same: It's worse—a lot worse—than you think it is.

North Carolina's reputation as a "progressive" state has always been exaggerated; the leadership style has tended toward what V. O. Key called "progressive plutocracy," or, as the late George Tindall more tactfully described it, "business progressivism." Governors Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford in the 1950s and early 1960s set the tone for the last half of the twentieth century, emphasizing racial moderation and new models of business and industrial development linked to infrastructure development and improved education from K–12 through university. It was an approach shared by moderate Republican governors like James Holshouser, Jr. and James Martin. Compared to most of the old Confederacy, the state's leadership made North Carolina seem an oasis of moderation in a desert of reactionary politics.1

http://southernspaces.org/2013/north-carolina-state-shock?utm_content=buffer9c9fa&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

[upaloopa]

1. People vote these guys in to power.

Don't people have to take some responsibility for what happens to them?

[WorseBeforeBetter]

2. They won't, and unfortunately...

the rest of us are bearing the brunt.

[blkmusclmachine]

3. .

.