Ecclesiastes-Based Real Estate Advice
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| The Private Intellectual Ecclesiastes-Based Real Estate Advice |
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Saturday, July 05, 2008 Jesse Helms, 1921-2008 UPDATED Being as I am a bleeding heart liberal, I am often driven to wonder what exactly produces personalities as fear-riven, hate-filled, and twisted as Jesse Helms. After all, one doesn't really choose to be a bigot, although we've all seen people try hard to stop being bigots. One doesn't usually choose, as far as I can tell, to be an omni-directional fountain of hostility and resentment. Public life has a way of clarifying, or nullifying these questions, however. Unlike his fellow veterans of Jim Crow politics, Helms never sought nor received the votes of his many black constituents. Repentence--which was forthcoming from fewer Southern racist politicians than it's been attributed to--was out of the question. He literally carried on the fight against civil rights by the means available in the post-1965 world. And since bigotries seldom travel alone, Helms distinguished himself by the ferocity of his homophobia as well. He was fond of brutal international dictators, callous towards anyone with AIDS, and contemptuous of attempts to do things like help starving people eat. Politics in a democracy being what they are, however, the blame ultimately falls to the people of North Carolina for repeatedly returning this stupid and vicious man to the U.S. Senate. This was one of the many travesties in our history that took place entirely without the consent of African Americans, who of course never have bought the National Review line that Helms and others like him really did support civil rights, just not the "particular vision" of civil rights that allowed black people to vote, get good jobs, live in reasonable physical security, and associate socially with white people. He did, presumably, believe that black people had the right to serve in the military and exchange their money for goods and services, so long as they did so apart from white people. As they proved with their breathtaking revisionism on the retirement of Strom Thurmond, with racial apologists and denialists like those at National Review around, you don't really need open bigots. There's cerainly no way a Jesse Helms could be elected to statewide office anymore. Racism is at once a diminished force in American politics and one that has been successfully mainstreamed and rationalized by the narratives of the Right. I suspect we'll see a lot less of a "Bradley [or Gantt] Effect" with Obama this year. That phenomenon was an artifact of a time when white people voted against black candidates because of their race but felt kind of bad about it so they lied to exit pollsters. By now, I bet most of the people who would have done that in the past have imbibed "non-racist" rationales for rejecting Obama: he's the affirmative action candidate, he's the candidate of white guilt, he's driven by 'identify politics' or 'political correctness,' and so on. Call it the "Ferraro Effect": I'm not a racist, I just resent black people for all their privileges and their bad attitudes. These people will feel no anxiety about voting racially and so their opinion will register more faithfully in polls. UPDATE: Yglesias says, regarding the movement conservative reaction to Helms' death: One fascinating thing about the death of Jesse Helms is the conservative reaction. One might expect that Helms' death would prompt from conservatives the sorts of things that I might say if, say, Al Sharpton died -- that he and I had some overlapping beliefs and I don't regard him as the world-historical villain that the right does, but that he's a problematic guy and I regard him and his methods as pretty marginal to American liberalism. But instead conservatives are taking a line that I might have regarded as an unfair smear just a week ago, and saying that Helms is a brilliant exemplar of the American conservative movement. And if that's what the Heritage Foundation and National Review and the other key pillars of American conservatism want me to believe, then I'm happy to believe it. But it reflects just absolutely horribly on them and their movement that this is how they want to be seen -- as best exemplified by bigotry, lunatic notions about foreign policy, and tobacco subsidies. Is this really surprising? When he died, Strom Thurmond was a conservative icon. When Goldwater died, you saw things in the Weekly Standard like "Goldwater, Right [about nuking China] and Wrong [about gays having rights]." Douthat's mere acknowledgment of the sainted William F. Buckley's bad record on race put him leagues ahead of his confreres. I would no longer say with certainty that movement conservative journalism isn't stocked with characters as racist and insane as Helms, which would obviously account for their fawning. But either way, the key thing about movement conservative journalism is that nothing must ever be reassessed. If there was something wrong with "conservative icon" Jesse Helms, well, there must be something wrong with conservatism. And we can't acknowledge that, ever. This is standard operating procedure. If it means claiming that a semi-literate racist was the Daniel Webster of his day, so be it. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 10:52 AM
Comments:
The late senator deserves a fitting memorial. See http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2008/07/05/jesse-helms/
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