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........

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