North Carolina fought for centuries to become a democracy. We can’t go numb now.

Cynicism is a poor facsimile of a skeptical mind. Perhaps unwittingly, North Carolina political insiders have vacated their sense of shock at the authoritarian machinations that have become a central hallmark of Republican rule in our state. NC Newsline editor Rob Schofield succinctly characterized this learned helplessness as a body politic gone “numb.” In the historical blink of an eye, the Raleigh establishment has internalized partisan arrogance as the political norm, and their complacency puts our tattered democracy at risk.

North Carolina’s long history of democratic failure should have instilled a permanent wariness in the guardians of our state’s government. In 1775 when our first state Constitution was ratified, all women were disenfranchised, a strict property requirement precluded many white males from service in the legislature, and only Protestant Christians were given the right to vote. Assuming that Black suffrage was self-evidently preposterous, the slaveholding framers accidentally allowed free Black men to vote, an “oversight” that the state’s white patriarchy emphatically reversed when slaveholder Nathaniel Macon convened North Carolina panjandrums to revise the state Constitution in the 1830s. This oppressive state of affairs held true through the White Supremacy Campaigns of 1898 and 1900 and the state’s stubborn refusal to ratify the 19th Amendment giving the right to vote to women.

Given the grim history of this former Jim Crow state, all North Carolinians should rejoice and cherish the advances we made towards authentic democracy between 1965 and 2010. Indeed, the last years of Democratic-Party government saw efforts to expand early voting, same-day registration, and other reforms that catalyzed higher voter turnout and a healthier democracy. But this success clearly bred complacency. When Republicans wrested control of state government from Democrats in 2010, our strides toward democracy hit the hard rocks of reaction.

The efforts of Republicans to clip the wings of our relatively young democracy are by now familiar. They passed the shockingly aggressive “Monster Voting Law” in 2013 attempting to crush the ballot access of people who had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. They made local election after local election into partisan events despite years of good governance under a nonpartisan framework. They closed voting sites on college campuses and made aggressive “party-line” changes, in the words of the Republican Party’s then-Executive Director, to voting policies in the state’s county-level Boards of Elections. One wild-eyed and capricious effort was made to deprive college students’ parents of a long-accepted tax deduction unless students voted at their parents’ addresses. “Act like an adult,” sneered the bill’s author, dripping with contempt for young people.

All of these gambits aimed to restrict voting by Democrats in the state. They were outrageous, but in the final analysis they were merely more extreme versions of the voter suppression that had been seen in nearly every Republican-controlled state in the 2010s. Where North Carolina Republicans broke new ground was in their attempt to destroy the separation of powers. With unprecedented aggression, Republicans moved to strip Governor-Elect Roy Cooper of most of his powers after he defeated disgraced one-term Governor Pat McCrory in 2016. They followed up on this authoritarianism repeatedly in the years to come, seemingly attempting to abolish any authority that the governor wielded in state government. Red state legislators would emulate them from coast to coast.

By now, though, many political observers fairly yawn at Republican efforts to undermine our democracy. We have been the site of the greatest assault on representative self-government the United States has seen since the days of Reconstruction and early-Jim Crow. But the tenor of press coverage is more and more nonchalant and even bored, assuming that Republicans will take powers from the governor and, in the words of a lugubrious 1990s anthem, “that’s the way it is.” This is unacceptable. Edmund Burke’s 18th-century admonishment that “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing” has practically become a cliché, but as Toni Morrison observed, sometimes cliché contains truth. North Carolina insiders need an energy drink and a cup of coffee, and they need to recover their role as the defenders of a democracy hard-won and ever-vulnerable.