Jesse Helms, the Far-Right, and the GOP

The GOP's right wing debate on John McCain's impending nomination provides a needed round of partisan introspection on the future direction of the conservative movement.

I've discussed the McCain controversy forward and backward, although in more recent posts I've looked beyond talk radio puritanism to examine conservative doctrinal foundations (see "After Optimism? Redefining Conservatism in the Post-Reagan Age").

With growing evidence that McCain's candidacy is forging a new GOP coalition, what historical or ideological lessons might we draw from the far-right's successes in Republican Party politics in the last few decades?

David Greenberg 's new review of Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, establishes some important points to consider:

Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said. With prodding from Novak, he added that he’d been spanked as a child for using the N-word and noted (with a delicious hint of uncertainty), “I don’t think I’ve used it since.” As for the caller’s main point — the virtue of keeping down blacks — it passed without comment.

William A. Link, a historian at the University of Florida, recounts this incident in “Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism,” his hefty life of the blunt, bullheaded, hard-right leader who — more than anyone besides Ronald Reagan — embodied conservatism in the 1980s and beyond. Summoning a measure of sympathy for his rather unsympathetic subject, Link can be overly diplomatic in discussing, as he calls it, Helms’s “racial insensitivity.” But it’s to his credit that even when engaging Helms’s more odious views, he shuns stridency while still managing to demonstrate the centrality of Dixie-bred racism to Helms’s career — and to the book’s larger tale of Southern-style conservatism’s ascent since the 1960s.

By the 1990s, to be sure, this racism was rarely articulated so starkly, or even manifested so consciously, as it was by the talk-show caller. But for more than four decades in public life — first as an influential journalist defending Jim Crow in the 1960s in North Carolina, then as “the most important conservative spokesman in the Senate” — Helms was obsessed with race; it was his political weapon of choice. In 1972, as a recent convert to the Republican Party, he won election to the Senate on school busing and kindred issues. In 1990, he aggressively played the race card — broadcasting a TV ad that showed white hands crumpling a job rejection letter — to repulse a challenge from Harvey Gantt, an African-American. And in his five Senate terms Helms led most of the major fights against racial change, opposing the creation of a Martin Luther King holiday in 1983 and the civil rights bill of 1991.

This disposition, of course, was hardly peculiar to Helms. On the contrary, he succeeded because he tapped into grievances — felt by the unbigoted as well as the nakedly prejudiced — that liberals were promoting black progress at the expense of struggling whites. He may have struck Northern liberals as a backwater buffoon, but his skill in framing racially charged issues, like busing and affirmative action, was instrumental in building today’s conservative movement.

By the end of his career, it is true, Helms’s malign wizardry with racial issues failed him. In 1993 his Senate colleague Carol Moseley Braun, an African-American, bested him in a floor fight over granting an extension of a patent to the United Daughters of the Confederacy for a design that featured the original Confederate flag. So stirring was her appeal that even Howell Heflin of Alabama, himself a Helmsian creature of the Old South, decided to oppose the extension, declaring, “We live today in a different world.” Hence the irony of backlash politics: even as Southern conservatives like Helms soared to power because of an antagonism to rights-based liberalism, they did so amid a national culture that was steadily growing more tolerant, more liberal.

Is the Helmsian model of Republican politics an anachronism?

Greenberg suggests it is. Yet, Harold Ford, who in his 2006 Senate bid was the target of Republican-financed, racially-charged attack advertising, might argue to the contrary.

To be clear: While it's obvious that today's GOP is not rife with Jesse Helms wannabes, the party's far-right faction nevertheless continues to stir allegations of intolerance on issues such as gay rights, immigration, and racial politics (I've been the subject of some myself).

The criticism's usually a caricatured version of principled political positions.

Still, it's hard to miss, for example, some apparent and highly-charged non-white animus in recent controversies over immigration reform in 2006 (and frankly during current debate over McCain's earned legalization for illegals as well). Indeed, some of the current outrage on the far-right over immigration reform would make Jesse Helms downright proud.

Having said that, it remains the case that this year's Republican race has demonstrated the marginalization of conservative talk radio mandarins (many of whose listeners formed the core of conservative partisans Helms brought into the GOP in earlier years).

As it looks now, the McCain campaign's been backed increasingly by moderate Republicans and independents, voters who'll likely form a potential winning Republican coalition in the fall.

Note, also, that while deep conservatives in last night's Potomac primaries backed Mike Huckabee over McCain roughly 2-to-1, exit polling found that three-quarters said they'd be satisfied with him as the GOP standard-bearer in November.

Considering McCain's alleged apostasies among the irrational right, yesterday's election data suggest that conservatives may indeed be different than those in the time of Helms' grip on the movement.