Following up on an item from Friday, former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), arguably the last proud, unrepentant racist on the national political scene, died at age 86, prompting an outpouring of support from his conservative allies.
The National Review published its editorial on Helms’ death today, labeling him “a true American patriot,” and questioning why everyone wants to raise a fuss about his opposition to civil rights.
One of the things he was against in the 1960s was, alas, civil rights. His defense of segregation was of course deeply misguided. But is it fair for this error to have been placed in the first sentence of the New York Times’s obituary of him? Certainly liberals have forgiven the pasts of other segregationists, from Sam Ervin to William Fulbright.
Helms’s real offense was a stubborn and victory-making political incorrectness. In 1990, he was running for reelection against Harvey Gantt, a black former mayor of Charlotte. As with many of Helms’s elections, this one was tight. His campaign ran a television advertisement about Gantt’s support for racial preferences in employment and college admissions. It pointed out that these preferences unfairly cost white applicants jobs. Merely pointing out that they cost whites jobs, let alone unfairly, was too much for liberals, who called the ad, and not the policies it addressed, racially divisive.
Given his past, Helms may not have been the best advocate for a message of colorblind equal opportunity, but he was never one to shy away from a fight. Did Helms “oppose civil rights,” as the Times put it? Actually, the Senator No of 1990 merely opposed a certain vision of them.
I swear I’m not making this up. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and click the link. Jesse Helms, the National Review argued, didn’t “oppose civil rights,” he “merely opposed a certain vision of them.”
And just to make this farce truly hysterical, National Review added, “Instead of thinking about what Senator No was against, it might be better to remember what Jesse Helms stood for: freedom for oppressed people around the globe.”
There’s no indication that the editorial board was kidding.
Now, it’s possible that the National Review is only passively troubled by Helms’ record on race given its own humiliating background. This is a magazine, after all, that lined up in 1955 “squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying Southern whites had the right to impose their ideas on blacks who were as yet culturally and politically inferior to them.”
Given this, perhaps it’s predictable that National Review would spin Helms’ — and its own — past as simply preferring an alternative vision of civil rights. You know, the one where one group of people get to deny basic human equality to another group of people based on skin color.
Yes, Helms opposed “a certain vision” of civil rights — preferring a vision in which black people had no civil rights.
National Review would prefer that we not mention or belabor this. Too bad. Helms’ legacy is one of hate, segregation, and white supremacy. His name should be an embarrassment to the conservative movement that looks to him as a leader. To call anyone who devoted his life to making millions of Americans second-class citizens in their own country a “true American patriot” is to pervert the meaning of American patriotism.
National Review’s editorial is more than just cringe-inducing; it’s a reflection of a bankrupt worldview. As Jonathan Chait noted, “[I]t would be one thing if conservatives celebrated the things they liked about Helms’ life while disavowing his bigotry. But their unalloyed celebration of Helms is a staggering indictment of movement conservatism’s views on race.”
Perhaps National Review’s editors can take a moment to consider this rather devastating item by hilzoy on Helms’ own remarks on matters of race, and then consider whether this impenitent white supremacist deserves to be called a “true American patriot.”