The idea that Republicans routinely lie is not particularly startling.

We’ve seen it over and over again in elections since at least 1980, but with less scruple and more muscle in the past few years.

In this past election there were thousands of mailers from GOP sources misdirecting voters in North Carolina and other states, not to mention the hyped-up fraudulent warnings about Ebola and ISIS. It’s best to not even think about the birthers, the impeachers and the death-panelers.

But the lie I’m interested in examining in this essay is the claim that Republicans “took back” the North Carolina government in 2010 and 2012 after a purported 100-plus years of Democratic rule.

Well, well. 

Labels are pretty malleable, as I noted in last month’s column. 

In the past few years Tar Heel Republicans have asserted that they “reclaimed” the state after a century of Democratic rule. What they fail to mention is that many of the Democratic polls who ruled this state before WWII or even up into Nixon’s presidency, switched parties. The new boss is, in many cases, exactly the same as the old boss.

Think Jesse Helms, for one.

Looking back, the greatest political divide followed the Civil War. Lincoln pretty much started the Republican Party, or at least put it on the political map. Following the war the newly emancipated and registered former slaves in the South voted Republican. The carpetbagger governments were Republican and Republicanism was ascendant in the South right up until the Compromise of 1877. That’s when Southern Democrats ensured the selection of Rutherford B. Hayes as president (in a hotly contested post-election Congressional settlement) in exchange for removal of Union troops from the South. Reconstruction was over.

Democrats quickly imposed the laws and rules we now call Jim Crow, and among other changes, tens of thousands of black voters were stripped of their registrations. 

So the Democratic Party that ruled North Carolina from the late 1800s until well into the post-WWII era was racist and deeply conservative at its core. That began to change. The national Party had aligned with labor during the FDR era, and began to support minority rights (though with big resistance from what would become known as the Dixiecrats.) 

When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he predicted that the Democrats had lost the South for decades. Democratic governors from Terry Sanford to Beverly Perdue moved this state in a steadily centrist to progressive direction, and the party dominating the General Assembly moved that way as well. Those governors pressed for better education, broader civil rights and an effort to attract future-leaning industries and the state leapt forward in university education and research. This accelerated as the right-wing Democrats moved into the Republican camp, following the example of Helms in North Carolina and Sen. Strom Thurmond to the south.

What this means is that the current crop of Republicans who have gained control across much of the Old South are the direct heirs of the Democrats who once held those posts. It’s clear that the big uptick in 2010 Republican votes was a direct reaction to the election of a black man to the presidency in 2008.

However, now that the Dems-turned-GOP have regained power in Raleigh, we see the same policies being enacted that were featured in the post-Civil War Democratic agenda. Suppression of voting rights, defunding of public education, cuts to welfare programs, preferential treatment for large land-owners and influential corporations, and all the rest.  

The sweetheart deal Senator-elect Thom Tillis cut with a Spanish multinational to privatize highway transport in our state is just one example of the trend. The voter ID law he and his cronies imposed on the state is another. Reduction of taxes on the rich and corporations coupled with an increase on taxation of the middle class and poor is yet another.

My point being this: don’t let anyone tell you that one party ruled North Carolina for a century and was finally thrown out in 2010. The truth is that one set of plutocrats has ruled North Carolina for most decades since reconstruction, they sometimes swap labels when the old ones wear out.

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Cecil Bothwell, author of nine books, including “She Walks On Water: A novel” (Brave Ulysses Books, 2013), is a member of Asheville City Council.