Nor Helm Nor Helmsman

How North Carolina's senior senator led conservatism astray

Jonathan Rauch | November 4, 2002

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Then there is Helms. In his world, if homosexuals win, heterosexuals lose. If blacks win, whites lose. In his 1990 Senate race, against a black opponent, he aired a famous—now infamous—television ad in which two white hands crumpled a letter while a voice-over intoned, "You needed that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?" Democrats accused him of race-baiting. In fact, affirmative action is a problematic policy that in some cases does discriminate against whites and that its supporters should be called upon to defend. The trouble with the ad, rather, was that it strengthened rather than weakened racial preferences by presenting a false, zero-sum choice: Blacks (or whites) win, so whites (or blacks) must lose. It implied that you could vote for the interests of blacks or the interests of whites, but you had to choose.

If conservatives hope to defeat racial preferences, they will need to argue that ending them will benefit everybody. But Helms is incapable of seeing the world that way. This is no mere matter of political "style," as Barnes put it. It is a matter of worldview, philosophy, temperament— in a word, everything. The difference between Reagan and Helms is the difference between a conservatism of hope and a conservatism of resentment.

There are, I have little doubt, literally millions of Americans who would be conservatives today if not for the snarling visage of Jesse Helms. His place in conservative annals is not alongside Reagan or Goldwater, or even Gingrich or Kemp, but next to Robert H.W. Welch Jr.

Robert who? Just so. Welch founded the John Birch Society—which was, like Jesse Helms, a wrong turn for conservatism, a blind alley, a mistake.