'We won’t let democracy die on our watch’: Gene Nichol on fighting authoritarianism in NC

Benjamin Barber interviewed UNC law professor and anti-poverty scholar Gene Nichol about his new book, “Now What? How North Carolina Can Blaze a Progressive Path Forward,” which describes North Carolina’s anti-democratic crusade and offers insights for countering the nationwide assault on democratic norms and values.

Nichol previously served as president at the College of William & Mary and then as an instructor at the UNC School of Law, where he directed the UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, formed in 2005. In 2015, despite forceful opposition from students and faculty, UNC's GOP-appointed Board of Governors voted to close the Poverty Center. At the time, UNC law school dean Jack Boger said, "The recommendation rests on no clearly discernible reason beyond a desire to stifle the outspokenness of the center's director, Gene Nichol, who continues to talk about the state's appalling poverty with unsparing candor."

In place of the Poverty Center, Nichols helped the UNC law school develop the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund, which continues to examine the systemic reality of poverty across the state. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. You can watch the full interview on the Institute's YouTube channel.

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You write that “pluralistic democracy is thought to be increasingly unacceptable if it diminishes a permanent tribal ascendancy.” How does this idea help explain both the Trump administration’s executive overreach and the push for one-party rule by North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers?

Those things are all interrelated, intertwined. I say in the introduction [to the book], that it's about war on democracy within the United States, but it's not about Donald Trump. I make no denial that Donald Trump is a singular threat to American democracy and constitutional government, the greatest threat probably in our history, or at least since the Civil War. But the threat to democracy in North Carolina is different. It's different in tone, different in the perceived tie to malevolence and hatred and cruelty.

Even if these are two different enterprises, the North Carolina war on democracy and the Trumpian war on the American promise, they are merged today in the state of North Carolina with federal [immigration] agents doing thuggish and fascist work, to be candid, in Charlotte and Raleigh and Durham, now across the state. And all of them are part and parcel, to answer your broader question, of the move to thwart pluralistic democracy in North Carolina and in the United States in favor of tribe and partisanship and certainly white supremacy.

It is not the first time, but this is the most recent and one of the most potent times, that, when faced with the promise of democracy and democracy increasingly becoming real, powerful forces in our society have risen up against it to thwart it, saying that, “If I got to choose between the promises of Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and my own tribe's personal privilege and ascendancy, I'm going to go with my tribe and I'm going to do everything I can to thwart democracy."

You describe North Carolina's anti-democratic crusade as being distinct and a much longer project than what we've seen nationally. Could you elaborate on these differences and how this approach continues to shape the state’s political landscape?

That's not sufficiently understood in North Carolina. I think a lot of North Carolinians understand that the national move, the Trumpist move to destroy democracy, is a stunning thing rooted in hatred and malice and in the rejection of pluralist democracy. They don’t readily understand that, even though our North Carolina's effort to thwart democracy is not as overtly horrifying, not as overtly violent and cruel, that it is almost every bit as effective. And as you just indicated, it's of a longer duration.

I'm of that group that believe at some point Donald Trump is going to implode because of his odd combination of cruelty and incompetence, and that the American people will say this needs to be relegated to the gutter where it belongs. But even if that's true, that is not going to mean that the war on democracy that is taking place in North Carolina, is going to cease. There's no reason even if Trump implodes that [N.C. Senate President Pro Tem] Phil Berger, [N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice] Paul Newby, these folks are going to let loose of us. They have us in a different kind of vice, a sort of power-based vice that they will relinquish only when we force it from their midst.

It starts with extreme partisan gerrymandering, which is first embraced a couple years ago once again by the North Carolina Supreme Court. Paul Newby writes a ridiculous opinion which says to North Carolinians, your constitutionally-based right to free elections does not include fair elections. "Boys will be boys," and this is the way government should operate.

Then we see it play out, like in 2024, where Democrats win statewide races, the major statewide races, because you can't gerrymander a statewide race. It's one district. But in the General Assembly, where more folks voted for Democratic representation, we end up with two-thirds of the seats going to Republicans because of extreme gerrymandering. Capturing the legislature, vesting its power, giving it the authority to work its will into the future, including, of course, working with great detriment to Black North Carolinians, to impoverished North Carolinians, to other marginalized folks.

Then that's not enough for the Republicans, because they get disappointed in these statewide races. Governor Cooper wins a statewide race, Governor Stein wins a statewide race. So, they now have taken what a lot of folks across the country call the North Carolina plan. I think of it as the Carolina two-step, which is unseen in American democratic history. And that is after a statewide election occurs and Republicans lose, they go into their own special session and rob the powers of the newly-elected Democratic official and transfer them to Republicans of their choice.

We just made the [N.C. State] Auditor the head of the [N.C. State Board of Elections], though no one in North Carolina thought that's what they were voting for. And no state in the United States has the auditor oversee elections. So, I don't know, maybe next time the Secretary of Agriculture will oversee the [State Bureau of Investigation] and the state librarian will give the State of the State address. This scheme, which would be unconstitutional in any state, is validated here.

When you add those mechanisms together, the operation of this court, the operation of the legislature, it crushes constitutional democracy. And the only thing that's going to be able to overcome it is the engaged citizenry of North Carolina. The courts are not going to do it. The federal courts are not going to do it. The traditional political consultants are not going to do it. The state bar is not going to do it. The only thing that is going to save us, and fortunately we're seeing good signs on that front, are the engaged and enraged citizens of North Carolina.

You mentioned the North Carolina Supreme Court’s failure to enforce constitutional guardrails in the state. How do you view the current condition of the judiciary in North Carolina, and how does it compare to broader trends in the judiciary across the country?

I have been a teacher of constitutional law for 40 years, and the Supreme Court has made that work much more difficult. At the federal level, this is what's happened in the United States Supreme Court. There are, as you know, these six Republican justices, and they have sorted themselves this way. Four of them fully sign on to the Trump agenda; they're all for it. Two of them, Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, I don't think are for it, but here's what they've decided: The only way to save their institution, the Supreme Court itself — because they're terrified of Trump — is to let him have anything that he wants. So, their position is that the only way to save judicial review is not to use it.

That means the end of judicial review at the federal level. And I don't believe that they're correct that it can be returned and will be returned once we get another president. So, the United States Supreme Court is in great violation of its historical mission, and it is not going to return to that mission.

In North Carolina, it's probably even more blatant. I don't know anyone who's been more critical of the North Carolina Supreme Court than I have. But even I didn't think they would do what they attempted to do in the Jefferson Griffin and Allison Riggs case [blocking the election victory of Democratic Justice Allison Riggs].

In broad daylight, with no attempt at legal explanation, no attempt of legal justification, they simply sought to steal an election ... They did get stopped by a Trump-appointed federal court, eventually. He said that the position of the North Carolina Supreme Court and this ridiculous judge who was the plaintiff (who's still on the court of appeals) was that North Carolina could change the rules of an election after the fact, and then apply those changes only to some parts of the electorate, not to others. The federal judge says, no, nobody thinks that can be the law. 

These justices are not stupid, but they think that they're above the law. This is something that hasn't been seen before and not of this blatant level. And this leads to a more found basis for optimism that I have: That was stunning to people. In every corner of North Carolina, it led to an outrage almost unseen or at least unseen since the heydays of the Moral Monday movement.

They weren't just the usual suspects. There were a lot of people who had not been involved in politics before, not been involved in demonstrations before. They would say things like, “Look, I don't like politics. I've got two jobs to work, and I've got kids to take care of. These leaders are trying to destroy our democracy but if you're gonna do it right in my face, if you're gonna rub my nose in it, then by God I'm not gonna stand for it.” A lot of those people unsurprisingly were veterans.

I think there is a powerful swell of opposition rising in North Carolina. People are outraged in a way that they won't tolerate, and that outrage, that engagement is the only thing that's here to save us. 

You argue that there is “potent reason for optimism among Tar Heel progressives,” particularly with the rise of community-based politics that connects grassroots movement work to partisan efforts. We saw a glimpse of this recently, as renewed democratic energy and sustained local mobilization translated into significant political victories during the 2025 election season. How do you see movement politics and grassroots organizing shaping the defense of democracy both in North Carolina and nationally in the years ahead?

It's at the heart of one's basis for optimism. You've seen it in the No Kings demonstrations across the country, which, if you're out there amongst them, those are not traditional protestors either. A lot of them are young, a lot of them are expressing their political oomph for the first time. But your broad point is one that I've felt and stressed for a very long time in North Carolina. That is the separation, unfortunate separation, between our movement politics and our electoral politics, our partisan politics.

Now I have a foot in both camps, that is I do partisan politics, and I do movement politics. And it has always bothered me, the separation that there is between the two. I sometimes talk to the members of the Democratic caucus in the General Assembly. And some of them are great heroes to me. But there is not the same sense of urgency often in those quarters about what's at stake as there is in movement politics all across North Carolina. I will sometimes say to them, “We've got a whole state out here that is on fire.”

I think that future success for us requires the fusion of movement politics and partisan politics. But I think that merger is happening now because, frankly, Republicans have so overplayed their hand. They've overplayed it by overtly trying to steal an election, and they're overplaying it right now by the brutalization [of immigration raids], which is taking place in Mecklenburg County, Wake County, Durham County. People are not going to stand for that. 

For years, you’ve been a leading voice against poverty and systemic inequality that has often made you a target of the state’s Republican leadership. In the book, you write that North Carolina’s Republican-led General Assembly has shown an “unyielding commitment to exalting the wealthy and crushing the poor.” Could you discuss how economic justice operates as a core democratic value, and how the growing concentration of wealth has weakened democratic institutions and practices in the state?

Yeah, and that's got to be a central part of any progressive agenda which will lead us out of the wilderness. Here's one thing I say: The central tenet of the Republican Party in North Carolina is to make rich people richer and to increase economic inequality. Now, you could think no one would adopt that as a theory of government, but that is what they have embraced. It's what they return to every single session of the legislature.

What do they say to their kids? You know, when you do that Pledge of Allegiance, leave out that “liberty and justice for all” business because that's kind of not our deal. We want to step on the necks of poor people.

I suggest in the book an array of changes. First of all, we have to have progressive taxation in North Carolina, not regressive taxation. We need to reinstate the earned income tax credit. We're the only state in the country to have abolished its earned income tax credit; that means for people making $35,000, $40,000 a year, working families, they raised the tax bill. Third, we need to develop what the COVID years proved works, and that is a bold child tax credit. Child poverty in North Carolina was reduced by 45%. It kind of returned us to the company of civilized nations. And then it was allowed to expire. And we have become, once again, what the United Nations calls the outlier of the world in child poverty.

Next, we're one of the handful of states who refuse to raise our minimum wage. And I think constitutionally, we ought to say to the General Assembly, every year you have to pass and enact a minimum wage, which is at least the national average. What we say to people, is the way we're going to compete economically in the United States is to treat our working people worse than everybody else does. So we've got to stop that.

And then last, as the battles of the last 15 years reflect, we have to treat health care as a fundamental human right. That means, at the very least for us, we have to assure Medicaid expansion and fund Medicaid expansion.

Every North Carolinian needs to know that the Democratic Party, the progressive parties in North Carolina, are interested principally in the plight of ordinary and low-income folk. Low-income folk are rightly confused about that now because Democrats have let them be confused in favor of rich people's government.

Throughout the book, you highlight the broader authoritarian crisis facing the country, yet you also argue that “a democracy that is won, or re-won, can be even more fulfilling than a democracy that is inherited.” With that in mind, what is your hope for the future of democracy in North Carolina and across the nation?

I am a teacher, so I deal with questions about hope a lot from young folks. And I'm an old man, which means I've had a lot of battles. Some I've won, probably more I've lost. I am sort of notorious for saying to people, quoting Dr. King's theory that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Or Mrs. Hamer's notion that I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, but if I fall, I'm falling five feet, four inches forward for justice. 

But there's another definition of hope which comes from Václav Havel, the Czech poet and eventual political leader. Havel says this, hope is not a prediction of success or a description of the world around us. It is a predisposition, a selected choice to live in the belief that we can make a difference in the quality of our shared and sometimes threatened lives. Now I'm paraphrasing, but what he means is this is a chosen way to live, living in hope. 

Fighting to achieve justice in North Carolina, fighting to achieve justice in the United States is, as Daniel Webster put it, the great work of human beings on Earth. I wish that it wasn't as contested as it was, I wish that that work sometimes was more worthy of success or assured of success. But you think about it this way. Rosa Parks didn't conduct a poll before she sat down for freedom. Mrs. Hamer didn't do a focus group before she started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Cesar Chavez didn't ask if he would be applauded when he went on his hunger strike. He said, Si Se Puede. I think we say Si Se Puede and we fight. It's the only thing that we can rely on.

And at least we'll know at the end of the day we're not going to allow democracy to be defeated and destroyed in the great state of North Carolina without putting up a hell of a ruckus, without putting up a hell of a fight for it. We are all charged. And unfortunately, that challenge is upon us right at this minute, right as we speak, right in the months ahead, right in the years ahead. This question will be decided. So, I'm honored to lock arms with Tar Heels across the state and say by God, we're not gonna put up with this quietly.