The Hyperpartisan State

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

North Carolina is a relatively purple state, where voting between the two major parties tends to be close. That might suggest a place of common ground and compromise, but it’s quite the opposite. “A couple of years before the rest of the country got nasty, we started to get nasty,” a North Carolina political scientist tells Charles Bethea. Not long ago, a veto-override vote devolved into a screaming match on the floor, to which the police were called. Bethea, a longtime political reporter based in Atlanta, went to Raleigh to examine how hyper-partisanship plays out on a state capitol, where everyone knows each other, and the political calculations seem to revolve more on who did what to whom, and when, than on who wants to do what now.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.8	How dare you, Mr. Speaker?
0:14.5	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:17.3	The unseemly lack of leadership is incredible.
0:22.5	That's just another day in the state capital of North Carolina.
0:26.9	Childishness, cowardice.
0:29.3	How dare you do this, Mr. Speaker?
0:31.8	A representative named Deb Butler is standing at her seat and shouting at Tim Moore,
0:36.4	who's the Speaker of the House in the
0:37.8	State Legislature.
0:38.8	You are making a mockery of this process.
0:42.0	You are deceiving all of North Carolina.
0:44.8	Your leadership is an embarrassment.
0:47.1	The Speaker had just called a vote to override a veto by the governor, which sounds
0:51.0	like pretty standard business in a state capital, any state capital.
0:55.4	So what's going on?
0:56.6	Are you proud of this?
0:58.4	Are you proud of yourselves?
1:00.5	Look at you.
1:01.9	Passes, chair, correct?
1:03.0	There's no one here.
1:04.6	It's a story with a lot to tell us about the increasingly partisan nature of our country.
	...

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