Nor Helm Nor Helmsman

How North Carolina's senior senator led conservatism astray

Much may go right and much wrong for conservatives on Tuesday, but there is no doubt that Election Day will bring them one piece of very good news. Jesse Helms will not be on the ballot.

Over the past few years, as Helms—the North Carolina Republican who has served in the Senate since 1973—aged toward senior statesmanship, and particularly after he announced his retirement in August of last year, conservatives have come to look on him with a sentimental smile. Oh, sure, he was cranky. But was he not also, come to think of it, a hero of American conservatism?

"People knew he could not be charmed or bullied into moving his position; so they moved towards him," wrote John O'Sullivan in National Review. "His 'no' stiffened many a soft Republican spine." In an article called "Jesse Helms, Maligned American Hero," L. Brent Bozell, a conservative commentator, wrote: "Without his political innovations, we would not have made the Republicans a more conservative party instead of a less-liberal-than party."

The most eloquent case for Helms was made in 1997 by Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard. "His relentless, unswerving application of conservative principles to practically every issue," wrote Barnes, meant that "no conservative, save Reagan, comes close to matching Helms's influence on American politics and policy in the quarter-century since he won a Senate seat in North Carolina." Indeed, Barnes wrote, Reagan and Helms agreed "on nearly everything, including the social issues. Their differences were solely matters of style. Reagan, as candidate and president, was conservatism with a happy face. Helms is conservatism with a stiffened spine."

Well, some Helms revisionism is in order, all right, but not in the way that Barnes and company believe. It is true that Helms was stubborn and frank, as his admirers say, and also politically mean and demagogic, as his detractors retort. But his legacy was not to have given energy and direction to the modern conservative movement (Reagan and Barry Goldwater did that), or to have lowered the tone of modern politics (attack politics was coming anyway). His legacy was to debase and discredit American conservatism.

The contrast with Reagan is instructive. Both were conservatives who stood firm against received opinion. But Reagan changed that opinion, whereas Helms deepened it. Reagan believed that markets generally work better than government, that security comes from strength, that high taxes are unjust and self-defeating, that inflation could be licked with tight money, and that resolve and firmness could win the Cold War.

Today, many people, even many who in 1980 thought Reagan was scary, believe that he was partly or wholly right. He had a point, in other words, and he won it. Helms, by contrast, did not have a point and did not win it. He had many points, and he lost most of them.

In May of 2001, Helms took to the Senate floor to offer an amendment to President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" education bill. The Supreme Court had recently held that the Boy Scouts of America, being a private group, had a constitutional right to exclude gays. In a few school districts, activists and parents were responding by asking school boards not to sponsor Boy Scout troops. The homosexual "radical militants," declared Helms, were at it again! He proposed a federal law barring any public school that received federal funds (in effect, every public school) from denying the Boy Scouts access to school facilities, or from discriminating against the Boy Scouts or any other group that discriminates against gays.

Reagan would not have done this. For one thing, he never had it in for gays (in 1978, indeed, he stuck his neck out to help defeat an anti-gay ballot initiative in California). The deeper reason was that Reagan was a principled believer in federalism, even if some localities made choices he disliked. Helms, in contrast, vindicated the liberal caricature of conservatism: Right-wingers will argue for states' rights in order to discriminate against blacks, and then they will turn around and argue for federal pre-emption in order to discriminate against gays.

Helms, unlike Reagan—or, for that matter, Goldwater or Newt Gingrich or Jack Kemp—did not have overarching and consistent principles; he had likes and dislikes. He was a bundle of prejudices. So are we all, but the purpose of principle is to discipline prejudice. One can speak meaningfully of "Reaganism" or "Goldwaterism," but "Helmsism" is not only unpronounceable but inconceivable. It would have no content other than Jesse Helms himself.

Barnes tried to argue that Helms, like Reagan, reoriented the political debate. "Positions he noisily took in Washington two decades ago, almost alone," wrote Barnes, "are now part of mainstream conservatism. Among them: the balanced-budget amendment, a flat tax, school prayer, curbs on food stamps, legislation banning abortion." Of course, what the items on that list have in common, with the possible and partial exception of limits on food stamps, is that none is a whit closer to enactment or broad acceptance than it was 20 years ago.

In 1997, Barnes asked: "Would the House have voted to kill the National Endowment for the Arts on July 10 if Helms hadn't first zinged the agency in 1989 for funding obscene art and roasted it regularly since then? Not a chance." Five years later, the NEA is not only alive but thriving, its budget up by 16 percent since 1997. If you are a conservative, pray that Jesse Helms does not take up your cause.

Helms is not without accomplishments: reforming the United Nations and State Department bureaucracies; blocking some nominations; leading opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and some other multilateral commitments. This was not inconsequential stuff, and now and then (on the International Criminal Court, I would argue) Helms was right. But then you have his pre-Senate opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act ("The single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress," Newsweek quotes him as having said), and his senatorial opposition to redress for the forced internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II (he lost), and his opposition to a national Martin Luther King holiday (he lost), and to the clean air and clean water laws of 1987 and 1990 (ditto, ditto), and so forth, and so on.

The point is not that Helms was often wrong but how he was wrong. He is often referred to—admiringly, so far as many conservatives are concerned—as "Senator No." Better would be "Senator Zero," as in "zero-sum."

Reagan made conservatism credible by showing that it could solve problems. It could make headway against inflation, against economic entropy, against communism, even against "malaise." He believed that dynamic change, kindled by the prodigious energies of entrepreneurs and ordinary people, would produce win-win outcomes: a country that was stronger and also more genuinely compassionate, richer but also fairer.

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.