By Alexander H. Jones

Surrounded by the modern rhythms of downtown Raleigh, a gingerbread Victorian house with golden trim has stood on Blount Street since the 19th century. The home belonged to a man with a name out of Greek mythology: Leonidas L. Polk. Polk was a farmer and a radical, the leading intellectual force of Gilded Age populism, and he was almost nominated for president. But he died before the Populist Party convention, and his movement never again reached the heights that it had achieved across the cotton fields and open prairies of the American South and West.

That Polk came from North Carolina was not a coincidence. Populism was stronger in this state than anywhere else in the South. While the region’s ruling Bourbon Democrats did face challenges from progressive insurgents in states like Virginia and Mississippi, it was only in the Tar Heel State that a biracial populist coalition toppled plutocratic rule and commenced a brief experiment in progressive reform. Populism has been the mud-strewn thread weaving its way through the state’s politics for 140 years, manifesting in the progressive crusades of Gov. Kerr Scott and the vituperative anti-United Nations tantrums of right-wing Senator Jesse Helms. In a state that spent centuries mired in poverty and provincial irrelevance, the impulse to punch upward at an arrogant elite has never diminished.

It had, however, gone into a bit of slumber. When Helms and Senator John Edwards departed from the public stage, the state’s politics became an arena for conflict between different kinds of pro-business politicians. No one has come forward to fill the role of “the people’s senator,” as Edwards’s campaign consultants called him in 1998. Business consolidated control over the state’s political culture because of North Carolina’s unique class dynamic: the white working class is socially conservative and deferential to authority, and the growing cohort of suburban professionals has traditionally identified with the interests of capital. As a result of this broad pro-business (or at least pro-hierarchy) orientation, North Carolina experienced a drought in populist politics in the 2000s and 2010s.

But populism has begun an unexpected resurgence here. Like the national Republican Party, the North Carolina GOP has seen a dramatic shift away from the business-minded moderation of governors Jim Holshouser and Jim Martin and toward a truculent populism that arrays rural whites against the “elites” living in big cities. This outburst of populist energy did not originate with Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Ironically, in fact, it was former Gov. Pat McCrory, a fervent advocate of corporate interests, whose diatribes against the companies boycotting North Carolina’s anti-trans law HB2 inaugurated a new era of populist posturing on the right.

The North Carolina Democratic Party has also evolved in a more pugilistic, anti-establishment direction. Party Chair Anderson Clayton is the spiritual heir to Kerr Scott, a rural resident who was driven into politics by anger at the deprivation her working-class neighbors faced in an urban-centric society. The institutional Democratic Party may embrace some of these populist themes in 2024, or it may hew to a safer Jim Hunt-style business progressivism in the interest of avoiding the extreme risk of a unified far-right government. But the progressive movement in this state would be well advised to consider a more combative, anti-corporate (and anti-corruption) message as it seeks to claw back political power after 14 brutal years of right-wing governance in North Carolina.

Demographics explain why. The progressive left in North Carolina suffers from two critical weaknesses in its ability to mobilize a coalition for economic, social, and racial justice. Working-class whites are now almost uniformly Republican while political engagement among people of color and the young remains chronically anemic. Given the ingrained social conservatism of the white working class, a progressive movement that declines to campaign on economic populism has little to offer blue-collar whites. The popularity among young voters of progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shows that economic-justice appeals resonate powerfully among the young, the Black, and the Brown. So perhaps the old Southern clarion call — “Every Man a King, and No Man Wears a Crown” — first heard from the lips of Louisiana Governor Huey Long could be updated for the feminist era and used to revive this state’s withered progressive spirit.

Alexander H. Jones is a policy analyst with Carolina Forward. He lives in Carrboro. Have feedback? Reach him at alex@carolinaforward.org.