The Helmsman

Jesse Helms is the latest in the line of white Southern conservatives whose graves the liberals are lining up to dance on. Any guy who attracts the hostility of the MSM for as long a time as he did can't be all bad, I say. And in fact, I liked the guy mainly for that fact, i.e. that he drove the liberals nuts. Of course, most of the "obits" are going to be written by the same people who attacked him night and day when he was a powerful figure in the Senate. So we always have to read between the lines. A first shot by Bart Barnes of the Washington Post, by way of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, is a good place to start. The title of the article describes Helms as "patron saint of the New Right". By "New Right" I assume is meant the conservative movement that came out of the South once they determined that the Democratic Party was opposed to every single value they held dear -- including, I suppose, being allowed to display the Confederate flag. The movement was highly correlated with the Evangelical movement as well, partly on the idea level and partly by simple coincidence. I mean, how are you going to have a major political movement coming out of the South that _doesn't_ involve Evangelicals, since they are the dominant species down there? But at the same time, conservative values and Southern traditional values -- which are not all that different, after all, from _anyone's_ traditional values -- have a high level of overlap, especially since the Old Right, which was almost entirely a Republican and rural Northern phenomenon, was always in opposition to the Old Left, which was Democrat, urban, and unfortunately highly symbiotic with the Catholic working class. So at one time, to be against Catholics (which Evangelicals are, by and large) meant to be against urban, Northern liberalism... and vice versa. The problem with the South, from the Civil War on, was that they were forced, by means of "Reconstruction" (I call it "redestruction"), to side with anyone but Northern Republicans. So the Party of Lincoln dared not be caught at sundown in any town south of the Mason-Dixon line for... well over 100 years actually. But in the meantime the Democrats had done a bit of morphing, having swallowed up the agenda of the Socialists, fur, tail, and all... and the Republicans, even though they were still the party of the Northern elite, had started showing a sympathetic face to the disenfranchised white Southerners.

So out of all this stew -- or gumbo -- comes Jesse Helms, representing the "New Right", as opposed to the Old Right, whose last prominent representatives were Taft and Goldwater. And the New Right had not only a political agenda, but a religious one and -- some would argue -- a racial one, since of the many offenses perpetrated by Northern liberals on the South, racial integration and all of its corollaries was certainly considered the worst. Blacks and whites had gotten along just fine in the South since the end of Reconstruction, thank you very much. Everyone knew their place. It was right out of Faulkner. Well, maybe. In any case, the powers that were in Washington were not interested in waiting for the South to "evolve" into a racially equitable place -- it had to be accomplished at the point of a gun (either literally or implied), and this created a whole new wave of resentment. Reconstruction had returned! And this gave impetus to the movement -- whatever you want to call it -- that Helms represented.

But having said all this -- having put the situation into broad perspective, let's say -- we need to have a quick look at the laundry list of Helms' alleged offenses... er, I mean accomplishments... well, it depends on the point of view, doesn't it? Aside from his patron sainthood, he is described as being "one of America's leading crusaders against communism, liberalism, tax increases, abortion, homosexuality, affirmative action and court-ordered busing to desegregate schools." Whew! That's quite a list. (I'm amazed they didn't include the fact that he had a corn-pone thick Southern accent, which to the MSM is a dead giveaway that someone is a Nazi sympathizer.) So, to take it item by item -- was he right about communism? Most certainly. Of all the catastrophes visited by mankind on itself in the past 200 years, communism has to take pride of place -- not just in terms of total body count but in terms of waste of human resources and distortion of political, philosophical, and moral principles. And of course communism, far from being on the "ash heap of history", is alive and well in Latin America. I imagine the "collectivist impulse" will always be part of the human makeup, as are all other heresies against the created order. But this fact should not deter us from fighting it, on all levels, at all times. And for his part in the struggle, Jesse Helms deserves our thanks. And as to "liberalism" -- well, that can be described as "communism without balls". But all the same objections apply, and it too has to be contended against wherever and whenever it arises. Tax increases, of course, are just a symptom of liberalism -- or were up until recently, when they have become a symptom of government in general.

Abortion? I don't even have to talk about that one. No issue has been that divisive in American politics since slavery, and there is no sign it is becoming any less divisive.

Now then, was Helms really opposed to "homosexuality"? I'd like to see a quote. What's more likely is that he was opposed to it as a political cause and as the basis for favored victim status. You see, once race -- or ethnicity -- or sexual identity -- becomes the basis for political movements and entitlements, there is no end to it, because, in the long run, _everyone_ has a race, an ethnicity, and a sexual identity. So it becomes a matter of who has how much clout at any given time -- i.e. it becomes a matter of sheer, brute power, and not of principle at all, no matter the claims of the various warring factions. Identity politics strikes directly at the heart of the premise that "all men are created equal", and the result is a kind of civil war, with moral and philosophical anarchy providing the frame of reference.

But let's move on. How about affirmative action and its most grotesque offspring, busing? Is there any doubt that these programs provided the seeds of resentment that are, to this day, sprouting and springing up, and creating whole new generations of hostility? Affirmative action, which was supposed to be about "opportunity", stayed that way for about five minutes, after which it turned into an "equal outcomes" program, after which it turned into a "compensatory, i.e. more than equal, outcomes" program. Quota systems were imposed in both the public and private sectors, and countless labor hours were expended on "AA" programs, and on adding up the numbers, and briefing them, and then going back and trying to do it better. Places like North Dakota were being slapped with quotas by bureaucrats in Washington, even though it turned out that the only blacks in North Dakota were in the military (no surprise there). So after years -- decades -- of squandering resources and creating resentment, what do the affirmative action programs -- all of them, added together -- have to boast about in terms of accomplishment? Frankly, I haven't heard a thing on this score. And even if there were some minor accomplishments here and there, were they really worth all that effort and coercion? And getting back to busing -- what did it ever accomplish, other than forcing white kids to attend failing, violent inner city schools and spend hours a day on buses? Forced busing was, it seems to me, the most egregious example of child abuse by the government to date... but has it ever been formally denouced? Has anyone ever apologized to the American public for this abomination? Not that I'm aware of. (I suppose that the silver lining to forced busing is that it started people really thinking about the profound problems and failures -- and opportunities for tyranny -- that the public school represent. It might even have helped spur the home schooling movement. For this, at least, we should be thankful.)

So that's the "rap" on Jesse -- which isn't really a rap at all, except for what happened next. The Evangelicals of the New Right flocked to Washington during the Reagan administration and set up a permanent encampment, even though Reagan was arguably more Old Right (now known as "paleocon") than New Right (at that time, a grass-roots conservative movement coming principally out of the South -- infiltration by ex-Trotskyites, AKA neocons, would come along later). But then a funny thing happened. The Evangelicals started to see the conservative movement -- i.e. "their" conservative movement -- as a means by which they could realize their vision of "salvation history". It wasn't just about domestic policy any longer, about getting rid of busing and affirmative action and government-funded crap called "art". Communism, while not dead, had suffered a stunning blow with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the de-Maoization of China. The "gays in the Army" issue was more or less defused by "don't ask, don't tell". Yes, the "family values" issue would inform -- as it continues to do -- elections on the national level. But they had their eyes on a bigger goal. It was now American's job to not only promote "democracy" throughout the world (which a cynic would say amounted to promoting capitalism, i.e. the interests of American-based international corporations) but to put "salvation history" into fast forward by adopting Israel as an integral part of the United States and declaring war (cultural as well as military) on all of its real or imagined enemies. So yes, this agenda had to lie low during the Clinton administration, but once George W. Bush was in office it went ahead at full throttle -- energized, of course, by 9-11. So the movement that laid siege to Washington because of affirmative action, with Helms at the helm, wound up taking over foreign policy, and so we have him and his ilk to thank for our current troubles in Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Islamic world. We also have them to thank for the jump in size of government, and extent and intensity of government meddling, that have resulted from the war effort. So the government that threw its weight around the Old South during the turbulent "desegregation" era is now many orders of magnitude larger, due at least in part to the efforts of the Southerners who populated the New Right.

Thus, the ironies of history, and the legacy of Jesse Helms -- or a part of it -- and a bit of political/social history as well. Any conservative who manages to rise above the fray has to ask, were the setbacks to the liberal agenda on the domestic side worth what is now happening in Iraq? Is a bigger but, in some ways, more "conservative" government preferable to a smaller but more liberal one? The problem with that latter point is that the bigger government can be taken over, in the very next election, by liberals, and any mechanism that might have been in place to help insure individual liberties can be turned over to the enforcement of group-based "rights". It is never a good idea to increase the size of government for any reason -- even temporarily, since no "temporary" increase over the years has ever turned out to be anything but permanent.

To put it another way, are a few improvements on the domestic side worth the fact that our military is engaged in a crusade in the Near East, for the benefit of a group of Evangelical-neocon-Christian Zionist fanatics? And will those improvements on the domestic side survive this war, i.e. economically, socially, and politically?

Does the fact that we now have a country where Ron Paul can mount a credible campaign for the presidency count? It would not have been possible in the 60s or 70s... and in the 80s it would not have been considered necessary. It's only recently, with the transformation of our foreign policy into an Evangelical crusade, that the "New Right" has been "outed" as, in fact, not conservative at all, but downright Wilsonian, i.e. liberal, Democratic, and "progressive" in spirit, when it comes to foreign policy. So in reaction to the offenses of the New Right, the Old Right has had to reassert itself, and thus we have the paleocons, Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, Joe Sobran, the Constitution Party, and.... this blog! Yes, let's not forget that. The grass roots are alive and well.