How Jesse Helms Invented the Republican Party

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

https://splinternews.com/how-jesse-helms-invented-the-republican-party-1827638920

Here is a phrase that is never used to describe good people: a product of their time.

It’s a familiar phrase, generally used to describe those who achieved greatness at terrible cost to other people, and as such one that accurately describes, say, three-fourths of the 20th century’s defining figures, with that percentage increasing with each century you go back. More than a worn-out phrase, though, it’s a cop-out. It’s a condemnation of sorts, but it’s mostly an elision and an excuse.

Jesse Helms was not a product of his time. He was born in Monroe, North Carolina, with a specific purpose, one so clear that when you trace your finger back along his life path you suck in your breath with each update and shift in your chair, because it’s so plainly clear that there was only ever one path for “the boll weevil in the cotton patch,” as Bill Link calls him in his Helms biography, Righteous Warrior. Helms was never going to be just a newspaper editor, or a career military man, or a personality at a radio station, or a race-baiting politician. He was always and only going to be Jesse Helms. He would be the hell-raiser, the road block, Senator No, the New Republican, the modern conservative stripped of all external niceties.

The story of North Carolina’s present state of affairs is not, of course, just about Jesse Helms. The triumph of extremism in the state was also made possible in part by decades of middle-ground politics, the sort of meliorative incrementalism long hailed as the reasonable approach to ending the South’s race-based caste system. The vaunted progressive leaders of that era, like the vaunted progressive leaders of ours, consistently made concessions; they were being reasonable, after all. And every time, those concessions were where the conservative faction burrowed, drilling further to create a self-widening chasm between the voter bases.