Jesse Helms: Confederate Patriot
The National Review's teary-eyed farewell to career bigot Jesse Helms ends on curious note:
Given his past, Helms may not have been the best advocate for a message of colorblind equal opportunity, but he was never one to shy away from a fight. Did Helms “oppose civil rights,” as the Times put it? Actually, the Senator No of 1990 merely opposed a certain vision of them.
Wow, what a concession! Jesse Helms "may not have been" the best person to fight for "colorblind equal opportunity"? You are really going out on a limb, National Review.
Why Helms ought to be given special consideration because he "was never one to shy away from a fight" is puzzling. History is full of sinister characters who never shied away from a fight; it's not in itself a virtue. I suppose they mean that he was true to his convictions -- but again, whether or not this is an admirable trait depends quite a lot on what, exactly, your convictions are.
And the strange assertion that Helms didn't oppose civil rights, "only a certain vision of them" is held until the final sentence, and left - deliberately, it seems -- without being expounded upon.
I suppose that if the authors were to explain what they meant, they would have to begin expressly defending what "civil rights" meant to Jesse Helms -- and here in the 21st century, that wouldn't do at all. If Helms could be said to believe in "civil rights" at all (a dodgy proposition), he believed in them for whites only -- and he believed that all the levers of the government and the legal system should protect whites from te indignities of black equality. Even the National Review won't openly advocate that agenda anymore.
Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg now says that all the mean liberals are wagging their fingers about Jesse Helms because they think he's a racist. But of course, Jonah cries, he isn't:
Helms' career is more complicated than the mean-spirited and agenda driven mainstream media obits have suggested.
Ah! The mainstream media simply doesn't understand the nuanced positions Jesse Helms took over the years.
Presumably, his nuanced position on the definition of "civil rights" falls in there somewhere.
