Helms

Well, I now see that a certain meme has developed:

After reading over the coverage of Jesse Helms' passing on a prominent conservative blog, it seems apt to quote Sean Connery in Goldfinger, and say that it is "shocking, positively shocking" that the conservative movement has trouble winning over black voters. -- Isaac Chotiner

Like Matt, I'm a bit surprised to see conservatives heaping praise on Jesse Helms. Helms was an awful bigot with a secondary interest in destroying international institutions and increasing tobacco subsidies. -- Ezra Klein

Three guesses who're the "conservatives" / "prominent conservative blog" in question. I met Jesse Helms once, in the same ten minutes that I met Strom Thurmond and Ted Kennedy -- imperfect men all. I'm not after a moral equivalence game here (e.g. manslaughter v. bigotry), but it doesn't take much -- I don't think -- to concede that lots of political men in America have been quite right about the wickedness of the abuse of political power and simultaneously quite deaf to the wickedness of the abuse of race power. Conservatives lose nothing by admitting that Jesse Helms was the product of a culture that merited much respect but for the one aspect that has come to define it.

There have been a goodly number of bigots, racists, and tolerators of slavery and segregation, over the years, whose understanding of political liberty has been sound or compelling. To admit as much is no more than to extend an insight of the same character about our Founders, whose race-related shortcomings taint, but do not diminish, the quality of their genius. The extension only carries into less impressive territory, excusing nothing, but acknowledging wisdom and knowledge where it is found. That bad or defective people can be right about things is a hard truth but an important one nonetheless. The saddest story of the South, from such a perspective, centers on the great decay in the quality of Southern political intellects after the founding Virginia generation. Calhoun (not a secessionist!) was a lonely light in a dim country. Alexander Stephens was the last statesman of the Old South of any real quality.

It's not silly to imagine that a South blessed with statesman of Founder-like stock would have carried at least a portion of the sub-Mason-Dixonite realm out of slave politics and into more perfect union and more perfect statehood. But then again the Upper South was entirely content to remain in the Union until the Union resolved to invade the Cotton Kingdom. That's a story for another day, but the bottom line here is that conservatives really must be clear that no single website should be taken as the Once and Final Official Mouthpiece -- especially on a question like posthumous praise for Jesse Helms. I can give Helms all the praise he merits while frowning duly upon his grave inadequacies over the years -- and neither diminish my standing nor that of conservatism. Indeed I rather suspect I'm elevating both.

MORE...Ross concurs -- even more forcefully pushing away from defending Helms in favor of defending good things Helms also defended: which now on my read sounds even righter.

PS the blockquotes in this post are not indented because Typepad has some mindblowingly serious and annoying problems afoot.

Comments

[Joules]

I paid so little attention to politics for the first 3-1/2 decades of my life that I didn't have more than a general awareness of his being considered a racist. NPR mentioned some of the things he was known for and it's amazing to me. I can't imagine wanting to fight against a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., for example. I was so glad when the guys at TAS mentioned that Helms was interested in helping with debt relief for Africa. It doesn't seem consistent, but maybe it was an outward sign of some internal changes taking place in his heart.