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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
His politics and his methods live on -- among liberals as well as conservatives.
By Michael Lind
Read more: Republican Party, Civil Rights, Racial Issues, Jesse Helms, Immigration, Opinion, Michael Lind, Martin Luther King Jr.
Justin Lane/The New York Times/Redux
Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., during a news conference on Capitol Hill in 1999.
July 11, 2008 | Having devoted his career to shocking and outraging American liberals, the late North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms continues to provoke them from his grave. Progressive journals and blogs are full of Helms horror stories. How he tried to make Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun cry by singing "Dixie" in the Senate elevator. How he won reelection against a black opponent by means of an ad showing the hands of a white man who had allegedly lost a job because of affirmative action. How he never repented of his segregationist past, unlike Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.
All quite true, quite horrifying and quite edifying. As a politician Helms was, by my lights, a monster. But even Grendel had a mother. It's worth taking a break from the horror stories to ponder where Jesse Helms came from -- and to wonder, with a renewed frisson of horror, whether that might be where we are headed.
Where Jesse Helms came from was the Third World, the American South between World War I and the civil rights revolution. In the generation before Helms was born the son of a police chief in 1921, the Southern oligarchy had been terrified by Populism. The greatest threat to the white elite was the revolt of white workers and farmers. To forestall that possibility, the Southern state governments, in the decade before World War I, used literacy tests, poll taxes and other measures to eliminate not only all blacks but half of the white Southern population from the electorate. In the election of 1936, voter turnout in Georgia was 16.1 percent, 13 percent in Mississippi, and only 10.7 percent in South Carolina. (It was higher, 42.7 percent, in Helms' North Carolina, where populists had abolished the poll tax.)
Having crushed the Republican and Populist parties, the oligarchs imposed a one-party dictatorship on the region, with secret state surveillance units and occasional collaboration between the police and the Ku Klux Klan. In its economy, the South was a banana republic, a commodity-exporting resource colony in which a "comprador bourgeoisie" of local landowners and local businessmen collaborated with investors in New York and elsewhere in fleecing the region.
To serve their interests, the old latifundist families and corporate elites hired "Dixie demagogues," who were to genuine populists like William Jennings Bryan what a Disney pirate is to a pirate. All of them were entertaining. Some began as entertainers, like musician-slash-flour miller W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, who went from hosting the "Hillbilly Flour" radio show to the Texas governor's mansion in 1939. The "Dixie demagogues" denounced various supposed enemies of the white tribe, but with two exceptions -- Huey Long and George Wallace -- they never threatened the rule of the country clubs and courthouse gangs. Jesse Helms was one of these theatrical quasi-populists, an uncomplicated establishment conservative who parlayed a liberal-baiting radio show into a political career. Like other faux-homespun Southern conservatives, he employed rhetorical populism against blacks, homosexuals, liberals, professors, modern artists and "common-ists" in the service of his business backers, most noticeably North Carolina's tobacco industry.
All of this would be of interest to regional historians only, if the South hadn't taken over the Republican Party and if the Republican Party hadn't taken over the United States in the last third of the 20th century. Jesse Helms was an architect of both takeovers. When this Dixie Democrat switched to the Republican Party, he was followed by thousands of others, so that by the end of the 20th century the former Confederacy was the most Republican part of the Union. Helms is also given credit for saving Ronald Reagan's career by helping him win the North Carolina primary and then the Republican nomination for president in 1980. If, as historian Sean Wilentz argues, this is, or until recently was, the Age of Reagan, then it was also in no small part the Age of Helms.
Today we take it for granted that American conservatism is defined by the values of Southern conservatism -- militarism, free trade, cheap labor, religious fundamentalism. But once upon a time there were other American conservatisms with quite different value systems. There was a snooty, WASP-y, plutocratic Northeastern conservatism, which was pro-business, internationalist, mildly philanthropic and in favor of birth control for European immigrants and third-world nations. And there was Robert Taft's Midwestern conservatism, which was anti-labor, fiscally conservative, protectionist and isolationist, and is represented today by Patrick Buchanan.
Anyone observing the American political scene in 1955, when William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review, would have assumed that the future of the right lay with Taft Republicans rather than with the peculiar far-right Democrats of the Deep South. Why did the Jesse Helms right defeat the Bob Taft right and define American conservatism in the last half-century?
For an answer, I think, we have to look beyond tactics like Richard Nixon's opportunistic Southern strategy to the deep structure of modern American politics, which is defined by the toxic interaction of weak political parties with media and money. Evolutionary biologists speak of "exaptation" -- the use of an organ that evolved for one purpose for another purpose in a new environment. Wings, for example, might have developed on feathered dinosaurs for purposes of sexual display before they were used for flight.
The faux-populist corporate conservatism that evolved in the South between the world wars was "exapted" in this sense to flourish in a national politics of weak parties, big media and big money. Helms, like other ideological conservatives, rose to power outside the ranks of the Republican Party machine, with its Elmer Fuddish Northeastern and Midwestern stalwarts like Bob Michel. Helms' career illustrated the confluence of media and money. He began, as we have seen, as a right-wing radio announcer, a proto-Limbaugh. And throughout his career, and now posthumously, he was the beneficiary of free media. Whether he was denouncing Martin Luther King Jr. or Robert Mapplethorpe, Helms knew exactly how to shock the mostly liberal media into showering him with publicity he didn't have to pay for.
The rubes and the elites
Relax, liberals. You've already won