The Third Reconstruction by The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II

Author:The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807083628
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2015-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The Darkness Before the Dawn

THOUGH WE HAD SEEN important wins in the Smithfield struggle—in John McNeil’s case, in the passing of the Racial Justice Act, the Wake County struggle, and the court’s defense of public education—we knew the extremists were holding their ground in their most important victory. After taking the General Assembly in 2010, they had acted immediately to redraw voting districts. It was simple power politics, which Democrats had engaged in as much as Republicans in the past. Only this time, we were learning, ultraconservative extremists had leveraged obscene amounts of money to buy a degree of control that they imagined no one could challenge. We would have to sue and wait for years to get the whole story, but eventually the truth came to light. North Carolina, it turned out, was ground zero for a coordinated buyout of American democracy by so-called dark money.

The Citizens United decision, we knew, had opened the door for new kinds of money to pour into America’s elections. But the decision also made it much more difficult to follow the money and see just where the moneyed elites were focusing their energies. We had our suspicions, of course. But facts matter in any public debate. Those who confront power without hard facts will always be accused of touting conspiracy theories.

Those who pay attention to human nature, however, need not be naïve about our tendency to conspire. The prophet Jeremiah said four thousand years ago, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?”1 Power plus secrecy guarantees conspiracy in human affairs. The authors of North Carolina’s constitution understood this. In order to preserve an open, democratic process in our state, they guaranteed every citizen the right to “assemble together to consult for their common good, to instruct their representatives, and to apply to the General Assembly for redress of grievances.” This is the right of every North Carolinian, regardless of race, creed, or class. But because this right had been trampled during the nineteenth century in the secret, closed-door meetings of white power elites, the wise authors of our constitution had followed this democratic guarantee immediately with a strict prohibition: “but secret political societies are dangerous to the liberties of a free people and shall not be tolerated.”2

“Secret political societies,” we learned, were precisely the enemy we were up against. Immediately following their heavily financed victory in 2010, extremists controlling the General Assembly used their previously dormant State Government Leadership Foundation (SGLF) to hire an outside consultant, Tom Hofeller, to oversee the gerrymandering of North Carolina’s voting districts. Because the IRS does not require the SGLF to disclose information about its donors, it provided the perfect shroud behind which Art Pope and his allies could fortify themselves against all future challenges. Their strategy was simple: identify those who would vote against them, isolate those votes in a minority of “packed” districts, and thus guarantee “democratic” power through a majority of sympathetic districts. Henceforth and forevermore, they thought, the popular vote wouldn’t matter.

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