Welcome to The Decade From Hell, our look back at an arbitrary 10-year period that began with a great outpouring of hope and ended in a cavalcade of despair.





In September 2010, Jon Stewart, then the popular host of The Daily Show, sat behind his desk and held up a bright yellow poster. On it were scrawled the words: “I disagree with you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not Hitler.”



The idea behind the poster was simple. Stewart was arguing that some 70 to 80 percent of Americans were being overruled in the political realm by a small percentage of extremists. This argument was the thesis for what would become the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, an event Stewart co-hosted later that October with fellow Comedy Central star Steven Colbert on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in front of an estimated crowd of 215,000. “This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear,” Stewart proclaimed. “They are, and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times.”

Three days after Stewart and Colbert’s rally and their call for a return to normalcy, midterm elections were held across the country. Most headlines and politics-watchers focused on the dramatic Republican gains in the House of Representatives. But the results that would most profoundly shape American politics came not at the national level, but in the state houses and senates, the chambers where state budgets are set and national policies and political movements start their journeys.

In North Carolina, a four-hour cruise down Interstate 95 from the rally, such a movement exploded into existence. The Democratic Party, which went into the election with a comfortable 68-52 lead in the state House and a 30-20 advantage in the Senate, was demolished. Republicans claimed 15 seats in the House and another 11 in the Senate, giving them complete control of the legislature for the first time in over a century.