Helms

Okay, I’ll go there.

Reader Patrick asks:

What do you make of Barr’s declaration that Jesse Helms was “one of the finest, most courageous and deeply principled men to ever serve in the United States Congress”?

Ugh. I’d like to take the Poulos line here – Helms’s deplorable racism (and his similarly deplorable views on HIV, and his disgusting rhetoric on homosexuality, and so on) is no more a disqualification for having been a good legislator (and, perhaps, an otherwise good man) than that of the American founders shows that we should similarly despise them – but it seems a bit too simple. Senator Helms was indeed “the product of a culture that merited much respect but for the one aspect that has come to define it”, but the fact that Helms remained so unrepentant about race even as he grew older and associated himself with a cultural set where certain false and offensive memes were no longer definitive clearly suggests that he warrants more severe disapprobation than this. [ADDENDUM: Bill Buckley's recantation of his early opposition to the civil rights movement, which even if it may have been rooted in soundly federalist principles and an opposition to certain sorts of social engineering nevertheless often took unsavory forms and gave tacit and explicit support to all sorts of societal evils, is a model for a better approach.]

That said, there can obviously be many other ways in which a willingness to chart one’s own course in Congress and refuse to fall in line with the politics and broader culture of the Beltway set – Helms often played the part of a sort of Senatorial “Dr. No” – is an admirable thing, and so what strikes me as most unfortunate in all of this is the general inability to treat Helms’s career with any real nuance. This applies to the demonizing Left as well as the canonizing Right – Matthew Yglesias, for instance, seems to me to have been right in suggesting that conservatives should have reacted to Helms’s death in the way that many liberals will respond to that of someone like Al Sharpton (”he and I had some overlapping beliefs and I don’t regard him as the world-historical villain that the right does, but … he’s a problematic guy and I regard him and his methods as pretty marginal to American liberalism”), but the fact is that the liberal take (Matt started things off by calling Helms “a bigot who’s [sic] incredibly retrograde foreign policy views managed to do a surprising amount of harm for a non-president and he’s probably responsible for all manner of ills I don’t even know about”, then adding “Good riddance”) has been so spiteful and lacking in any sort of subtlety that it’s hardly surprising that many on the Right have tried to whitewash over the man’s great many sins. This is, in other words, exactly the sort of “Us vs. Them” politicking that was Helms’s forte, and it’s a shame that we can’t manage to move ourselves beyond it. We’ve all got some unpleasant chapters in our not-so-distant past, and using them as an all-purpose political whupping stick does not do anything good for anyone.

As for Bob Barr, if there were any evidence that he subscribed to the worst elements of the Helmsian worldview, he’d lose my vote right quick. But a press release on the death of one of the elder statesmen of a party you served for many years is not the time to impugn the legacy of the dead or grapple in detail with American conservatism’s troubled history. (It’s the punditry that I’m more worried about.) In any case, the banality of Barr’s statement seems to me to be a good indication that we’ve come a long way.

[UPDATE: Jim Henley responds:

But Barr is a protest candidate. So his candidacy just is the things he chooses to say about the topics he bothers to address. With a major-party candidate like Obama or McCain, you can argue that their public statements are less important than their general policy positions, the talent pool from which they’d fish up an administration or the impact of their elections on the shape of the courts. For people like Bob Barr and Ralph Nader, none of that comes into play. One votes for them to “send a message” or one doesn’t vote for them. Bob Barr just went out his way to make his message a little creepier.

Fair enough, and if I were more of a left-libertarian and less of a conservative, I imagine I'd feel more like Jim (or Doug Craig) and less like I in fact do. If what I'm facing is a forced choice between McCain, Obama, Barr, Nader, and Chuck Baldwin (and note that I think of any vote as a purely symbolic gesture, it still seems to me that the third of those is the best of the lot.]

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