Harvard College Democrats

On Jesse Helms

Posted 7/07/08 by Eva Lam

I know that I’m several days late to jump on the conservatives-are-stupid-for-lionizing-Jesse-Helms train, but I didn’t think I had much to say until I saw this on Ta-Nehisi and couldn’t could, but didn’t quite want to believe it. According to the Heritage Foundation, Jesse Helms was a “champion of freedom” and “a powerful voice for free markets and free people.” Similarly, Billy Graham called him a “patriot who fought for free markets and free people.” Members of North Carolina’s Republican congressional delegation felt similarly: Robin Hayes said that Helms “will be remembered for his work to spread freedom around the world,” and Virginia Foxx praised his “strong legacy of fighting for the freedoms that make America great.”

Perhaps because I usually embrace the good old-fashioned Midwestern desire that we all just try to get along, perhaps because there are people much better-placed than me to call out racism persuasively, I usually give conservatives the benefit of the doubt, assuming that the modern Republican Party’s lack of useful ideas about how to address the astounding inequalities between black and white Americans is a function of oblivion, incompetence, or neglect – the kind of thing that happens, I would argue, among people who isolate themselves in the suburbs and fetishize the “inner city” as an impassable danger zone – rather than active racism. But it’s really difficult for me to maintain my understanding that the Republicans have moved from race-bashing to gay-bashing when prominent members of the conservative “movement,” if you can use that term to describe a group of people who want to go nowhere at best and backwards at worst, continue to maintain Jesse Helms’ understanding that the only freedom that counts is the freedom of white people.