Did Jesse Helms actually win in the end?

[BrainGlutton]

Many comments in this Pit thread (including some of mine) assume the late Senator Jesse Helms lived long enough to see everything he believed and fought for in his public life defeated or discredited, to the point that we’re on the verge of electing an African-American as POTUS. However, political pundit Michael Lind of the New America Foundation comments in a recent article, “Jesse Helms Is Not Dead”:

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.

<snip>

So here’s the real horror story. In every respect except white supremacy, contemporary America looks more and more like the South between the world wars that Jesse Helms wanted to preserve. We have growing inequality and concentration of wealth, and an elite economic strategy like that of the traditional South that focuses on importing cheap labor, outsourcing manufacturing and exporting commodities (we supply industrial Asia with timber and soybeans). Private-sector unions are all but dead, as in the South. The political parties, as organizations, are weak, as in the South. More and more elected officials are self-funded millionaires or billionaires. Contemporary American politics, like Southern politics past and present, pits elite business-class conservatives against feeble, housebroken elite progressives who are not real threats to entrenched privilege. When, inevitably, the occasional populist protest figure like Perot, Dobbs or Huckabee appears, the affluent progressives quickly close ranks with the corporate conservatives.

Jesse Helms is dead – but his sinister influence lives on. If you seek his monument, look around.

True?

[smiling_bandit]

First off, Helms was on the political Left of his day, more or less. Democrats of the day were vaguely leftist at least in their economic programs (heck, arguably the entire civil rights movement was essentially an internal battle between the racist and non-racist left, with the right crowning the winner).

Second, Helms kinda embodies populism. I can’t speak for what he personally wanted, but he had very much a mass appeal himself. The fact that a lot of people (mostly from other parts of the country) didn’t like him does not change that.

I don’t even know why I’m in here. I never voted for Helms and never even lived in is state, and never paid much attention to him. But geez - there are some sick people out there filled with hate, for whom every second is a chance to spew their venom. And then there’s also Jessie Helms.

[BrainGlutton]

@smiling bandit

First off, Helms was on the political Left of his day, more or less.

Eh?

A more interesting question is in what sense he was “right.” From the same article:

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?

@smiling bandit

Democrats of the day were vaguely leftist at least in their economic programs . . .

But Helms never was.

[smiling_bandit]

@BrainGlutton

But Helms never was.

As near as Ah can tell, yeah. That was the basis of the populist party which he and his co-opted.

[John_Mace]

Michael Lind is an idiot. He needs to visit CA sometime before making such ridiculous generalizations.

[BrainGlutton]

@John Mace

Michael Lind is an idiot. He needs to visit CA sometime before making such ridiculous generalizations.

What’s California got to do with it?

[John_Mace]

@BrainGlutton

What’s California got to do with it?

Last I looked, we were part of the US. There have been a few technological innovations originating there. Just a few… And some of them were made by [gasp!] immigrants!!

[elucidator]

We of the hard-core anti-immigrant left are shocked to hear it.

[BrainGlutton]

@John Mace

Last I looked, we were part of the US. There have been a few technological innovations originating there. Just a few… And some of them were made by [gasp!] immigrants!!

So? None of that contradicts Lind’s “generalizations”.