When Bigots Die
(posted by Daniel Koffler)
Hilary Bok has the definitive round-up of movement conservative reactions to the death of Jesse Helms. The take-away point is that those who participated this weekend in the right’s uncritical hagiography of the man David Broder — David fucking Broder! — called “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country” have forfeited whatever right they may have had to be taken seriously (a) wondering what cultural deficiencies cause black folks to vote for Democrats 90-10, (b) whining about “grievance-mongers” in the black community, (c) whining about the alleged racism of Jeremiah Wright in particular, (d) responding to observations of the GOP’s strategic cultivation of racism over the last 40 years with the cry, “but the Democrat party set up segregation,” and (e) absolving their party of responsibility for cultivating racism with the cry, “but Robert Byrd was a Klansman.” Needless to say, the only sad thing about the death of a loathsome racist who did at least as much as any American politician of the last few decades to cause real suffering in his country and the wider world, and who snuffed it without so much as a token second thought about his bigotry, is that he won’t be around for the inauguration of the first black president. One hopes at least that his mind was intact at the end, so that he could fully comprehend that gay marriage is thriving and on an irreversible course to full national recognition.
UPDATE: Good for Max Boot. I mean that sincerely. Now if he could just start drawing broader conclusions about why unifying the world in opposition to American foreign policy is a bad idea, he might really be in business.
UPDATE: Good for Ross Douthat, too. But let’s be clear: If conservatives want to make it plain that it’s not true that “the essence of conservatism is and always has been Dixiecrat-ism … [and] that everything that conservatism has accomplished and stood for since 1965—Reagan, the tax revolt, law-and-order, deregulation, the fight against affirmative action, the critique of the welfare state…everything—is the poisoned fruit of the poisoned tree,” they should be at pains to say that Jesse Helms is anything but the gold standard of conservatism.
Tags: jesse helms, racism
July 7th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Have Republicans used racism at times (e.g., from the ’70s onward) to win elections? Sure! But they’ve also been accused of racism for things that patently aren’t racist.
Exhibit A
The Willie Horton ad. Not racist. It’s about criminal justice policy.
Exhibit B
The Jesse Helms “Hands” ad. It’s about the Affirmative Action.
Exhibit C
The George W. Bush veto of the Texas Hate Crimes Statute.
Exhibit D
The insistence on “actual enumeration” for Census Counts.
Exhibit E
The Bob Corker ad going after Harold Ford,
Exhibit F
The Federal Government’s mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and aftermath.
Exhibit G
The 1996 Welfare Reform Act
We could easily–EASILY–go through to letter Z.
When the Republican Party does act to exclude Blacks–usually through shady, unpublicized Election Day cheating–it’s only for the secondary fact that they’re Democrats. (No, that doesn’t make it okay. It does make it less bad.)
But Jeremiah Wright is a racist…and Robert Byrd did say “nigger” on TV, without so much as official Senate censure.
So here’s my question to you, Daniel Koffler: why are you so blinkered on this issue?
July 7th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
jkc: On what basis do you declare Jeremiah Wright a racist? When Robert Byrd said “n;gger” on TV, was his purpose to demean black people? Are you saying that Jesse Helms was NOT a racist?
July 7th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Oh, Jesse Helms was a racist as sure as the night is dark.
When Robert Byrd used the N-word, I think his purpose was to say that there’s a low-class type of person–that used to be identified with the Black race–that actually exists in white communities, too.
As for Jeremiah Wright, I’ll agree that most of what he says is just firebrand anti-imperialism and–even with some of his crazy conspiracy theories, like the intentional AIDS infection–is a welcome corrective for a country that’s gone war-crazy. But.
Would you say this qualifies as racist?
Also, with regard to the US of KKK A comments, they can be explained away as criticisms of the government. But I strongly suspect that Rev. Wright knows that when he says that, listeners (outside his congregation) consider themselves to be constituent members of the nation and, yet, somehow neither technically Klansmen nor their moral equivalent.
The “White Man’s greed runs a world in need” quote strikes me as an unjustifiable blanket condemnation for a master rhetorician who knows, if nothing else, how to use words very precisely.
Wright is an extremely, savvy, intelligent, well-spoken, Ivy League-educated dude. He’s not Sean Hannity who’s barely smart enough to breathe. He knows how to use invective subtly. Check out 5:20 to 5:40 of this YouTube clip.
I guess that my broader point was that for all the much-commented-upon (and very real) sins of the Republican Party on racial matters, they also get (a) a lot of undeserved shit and (b) overlooked when they try to do the right thing.
Come to think of it, Koffler’s post is evidence of this very fact,
July 7th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
I think the Willie Horton ad was pretty clearly designed to trigger the most atavistic racial fears in whites, appealing directly to their reptilian brains with as little intervening conscious thought as possible. That’s not to say Lee Atwater was a conscious racist. He was no doubt intelligent and cynical enough to laugh at his intended audience. But when you craft an ad on “criminal justice policy” that just happens to select the example of black-on-white crime (and a white *woman*, no less!), coupled with a picture of a menacing-looking black man, it’s pretty obvious what subliminal effect you’re going for.
That would be like, say, Wal-Mart running an ad in the ghetto calling on shoppers to avoid price gougers and come out to Wally World, that *just happened* to show a Korean grocer–and then saying it wasn’t about race, it was just about “W-M’s pricing policy.”
Don’t kid yourself–Atwater knew goddamned well what he was doing.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Kevin,
This was, I believe, in the middle of the crack epidemic. Crime, especially the violent kind, was spiraling out of control with no end in sight. To take one example, New York City had roughly four times as many murders in 1988 as it did in 2005–even though the population was significantly smaller in earlier year.
It was just a naked fact that Dukakis had maintained a weekend furlough program for prisoners, including violent ones, when he was governor of Massachusetts. It’s also a fact that Horton escaped and murdered people while he was technically “incarcerated.” What’s the Bush campaign supposed to do–not highlight Dukakis’s incompetence and laxity on a top issue of the day, just to spare racial sensitivities?
Here’s the ad. People can judge for themselves if it’s gratuitously racialized.
Fun fact: Al Gore was the first person to mention the furlough program, although he oafishly failed to “put a face on it.”
July 8th, 2008 at 12:07 am
Well, the so-called “crack epidemic” is an issue in its own right. Like most other moral panics associated with the drug war, I view it as largely an issue manufactured for prole consumption–as Mencken put it, to whip the population into a state of fear where they’re ready to turn to the state for “protection.”
July 8th, 2008 at 12:14 am
Jkc, it’s also a naked fact that William Horton wasn’t the only furloughed prisoner to murder someone while on furlough. It’s a naked fact that “Americans for Bush” chose to build a commercial around scary-looking photos of a black guy, and mention that he raped a woman. (Without mentioning the woman’s race, which meant that most Americans would assume she was white.)
Oh, and your Wright link goes to a 404 page.
July 8th, 2008 at 5:47 am
Kevin, whether or not you meant to do so, you appear to have changed the topic. My point was that we had something like 50% more homicides in 1988 than in 2005. People cared about lowering the rate violent crime at the time–and with reason. (The murder rate had grown steadily since the mid ’60s and, at the time, showed no signs of abating )
Avram, sorry about the dead link. (It was working last night.) Try this.
July 12th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
[...] a member of the conservative movement. (Presumably, this counts as evidence that Jesse Helms might really have been a conservative par excellence.) Now, nanny-state liberals like Matt might have some public-interest [...]