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Tar heel pioneer: name any Republican strategy of the past thirty years; chances are Jesse Helms got there first

Washington Monthly, Jan-March, 2008 by Ed Kilgore

Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism

by William A. Link

St. Martin's Press, 482 pp.

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For an astonishing thirty years, Jesse Helms embodied conservative extremism in the U.S. Senate and the Republican Party; even in his "mellow" final term, ending in 2003, his rare nod toward mainstream opinion served only to highlight the rest of his wildly reactionary views. But was he a political outlier, as his frequent battles with other Republicans-including conservative icon Ronald Reagan--seem to show, or a trendsetter?

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William A. Link's scholarly biography of Helms, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, provides considerable ammunition for the latter view, as the subtitle indicates. If this excellent book has one weakness, it's that the author doesn't spend much time in explicit comparisons between Helms and his right-wing allies and successors. But after reading it, I have a hard time thinking of a major aspect of the modern right where Jesse didn't get there first, and with a flourish.

It's true that Helms wasn't the very first southern conservative Democrat to shift into the GOP because of opposition to civil rights. But he certainly was in the vanguard, and after winning his first Senate race in 1972 with strong support from his conservative Democratic base in the eastern part of North Carolina, he supervised a brisk conquest of the state GOP from its ancient moderate mountains-and-piedmont ownership.

A radio and TV commentator for more than a decade prior to his first run for office in 1972, Helms was unquestionably a pioneer in the media-heavy campaign methods that dominated U.S. politics by the end of the 1980s. Personal campaigning for him was a rarity, and often a sideshow. Given his background, it's interesting that Helms also created a template for conservative demonization of the "liberal media." One of the largely forgotten incidents Link discusses is Helms's brief 1985 campaign to engineer (in conjunction, ironically, with Ted Turner) a hostile takeover of CBS--an early effort to give conservatives a "fair and balanced" television network.

At the same time, Helms was also a key figure in the development of an ideologically motivated small-donor base for the conservative movement and the GOP. Much of Link's book is usefully devoted to Helm's uneasy but integral relationship with the North Carolina-based fired-raising machine the Congressional Club, which started life as a Helms vehicle employing the services of the Thomas Edison of right-wing direct mail, Richard Viguerie.

There are three areas in which Helms's model for other conservatives is better known but sometimes underestimated: culture-war "wedge" politics; legislative obstructionism in the Senate; and an antirealist, unilateralist foreign policy posture.

Helms was undoubtedly the living connection between the racial politics of the Old South and the religion-based cultural politics of the New Right. He was the one surviving segregationist of stature who never regretted or retracted his opposition to the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s. His career-long opposition to any national gesture commemorating the civil rights movement (most notably, his interminable and often scurrilous rearguard efforts to taint the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.) made his strident rhetoric against voting rights enforcement and anything approaching affirmative action an afterthought. And Helms's two reelection campaigns (in 1990 and 1996) against African American Democrat Harvey Gantt pivoted on explicit race baiting, as Helms's Congressional Club allies later admitted to Link.

Helms practically invented the modern conservative politics of sexuality, along with the electoral mobilization of white conservative evangelicals, starting back in the 1970s. In 1977, he seized on Anita Bryant's successful campaign to overturn a gay rights ordinance in Miami and began building a national backlash against antidiscrimination laws. As early as 1979, he was making speeches about the terrible threat of "secular humanism" to Christianity, making the wonky Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies an unlikely villain. When the AIDS epidemic emerged in the 1980s, Helms began an extended and violently worded campaign to "protect" Americans from the "perverts" whose "disgusting" habits were responsible for AIDS, while attacking efforts to find effective treatments. Most memorably, Helms single-handedly made the National Endowment of the Arts' subsidies for "obscene" and "homosexual" artwork a culture-war staple for nearly two decades.

In the Senate, Helms was best known, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, for his mastery of Senate procedures to slow down or defeat legislation and nominations he didn't like--usually against a majority of his colleagues--and to create symbolic votes representing his various causes. As Link explains, Helms's main service to the antiabortion movement over the years was his success in creating "test votes" that placed members of Congress on record for or against innocuous-sounding but corrosive amendments aimed at limiting abortion rights. Without question, the guerrilla tactics being employed today by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to thwart a Democratic Congress rely heavily on Helms's legislative precedents.

Tar heel pioneer: name any Republican strategy of the past thirty years; chances are Jesse Helms got there first

Washington Monthly, Jan-March, 2008 by Ed Kilgore

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