Conservative Icon Jesse Helms

NPR had someone from the Heritage Foundation praising Jesse Helms, and when I Googled ‘Conservative Icon’, pages of his obits popped up.

For a long time I’ve wondered what conservatism has to do with conserving anything. If Jesse Helms, radical racist, was the heart of conservatism, then he represents a politics that should be buried along with himself.

We’ll spend the first century of this new milleneum repairing the damage that racial discrimination has inflicted on our country. We can’t go back and repair the lives that were stunted, the opportunities denied, the dreams murdered. We just have to live in today.

On this Fourth of July, 2008, let’s renew our commitment to freedom, justice, and equality for all.

7 thoughts on “Conservative Icon Jesse Helms”

  2. Nancy-this may come as a shock to you,but James Meredith,who was nearly killed for integrating Ole Miss wound up working for Jesse Helms.I don’t understand that one.They were associated for nearly 10 years.
    I never thought Helms was worth two cents,although he did vote against Ruth Bader Ginsburg-even a stopped clock is right twice a day. .I did admire Barry Goldwater-he was a real conservative.

  3. Mr. Helms was a character for whom the term,”nasty old man,” was created. His career illustrates all that is unhealthy about political lives, but with an edge–his supposed conservatism was really cover for being a reactionary; his disdain for efforts to right injustice was cover for old fashioned racist ideas. Was he that different from many of his generation–certainly not. He would have been a Dixiecrat if Lyndon Johnson had not come along and blown away the cover of being “honorable and remembering the Old South. He opted for doing the expedient thing and switching parties. Once can see the career of Helms in the last survirors of that naty time in politics in people like Robert Byrd and his “affair” with the KKK and racism. They did anything to get elected, spewed hate and then when the world changed they put on new clothes and found religion. It is difficult to understand who to blame: the people like Helms or Byrd or us, the voters–we put them there and kept them there election after election.

  4. Bryan, from Wikipedia–

    In the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP)[44] Congressional Report Card for the 108th Congress (spanning the 2003–2004 congressional session), Byrd was awarded with an approval rating of 100% for favoring the NAACP’s position in all 33 bills presented to the United States Senate regarding issues of their concern. Only 16 other Senators of the same session matched this approval rating. In June 2005, Byrd[45] proposed an additional $10 million in federal funding for the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington, D.C., remarking that “With the passage of time, we have come to learn that his Dream was the American Dream, and few ever expressed it more eloquently.”

    In other words, actions count–it’s never too late to start doing the right thing. Unless you have passed away without ever admitting you have to change.

    Of course, it took Byrd a long time, but better late than never. The people led, he eventually followed. As a voter, I hope to do better than to elect anyone who singles out groups of Americans for second class status.

  5. Goerge Wallace wound up getting many Afro-American voters to support him when he made a comeback as Governor.He seemed to have actually changed his attitude.
    Unlike a Ross Barnett,Wallace always seemed less out and out bigoted than defiant of the Federal government.Once segregation was gone,Wallace appeared to take a “that was then this is now”approach and it worked.

  6. having his spinal cord severed might have given him a different perspective. it’s harder to look down on people from a wheelchair.

  7. Sheik Yassin of Hamas apparently didn’t get mellowed out by a wheelchair-it took a rocket.
    Wallace was a populist,who once he dropped his racist position,had a lot of other qualities that got him the vote.
    Helms was always about as dry and sour as a popcorn fart.

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