Michael Lind makes the case in Salon this morning that Helms is no troglodyte who somehow survived while the rest of his cave-dwelling species died out, but he represents the the evolutionary strain in American politics that dominates now and will continue to dominate:
Today we take it for granted that American conservatism is defined by the values of Southern conservatism -- militarism, free trade, cheap labor, religious fundamentalism. But once upon a time there were other American conservatisms with quite different value systems. There was a snooty, WASP-y, plutocratic Northeastern conservatism, which was pro-business, internationalist, mildly philanthropic and in favor of birth control for European immigrants and third-world nations. And there was Robert Taft's Midwestern conservatism, which was anti-labor, fiscally conservative, protectionist and isolationist, and is represented today by Patrick Buchanan.
Anyone observing the American political scene in 1955, when William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review, would have assumed that the future of the right lay with Taft Republicans rather than with the peculiar far-right Democrats of the Deep South. Why did the Jesse Helms right defeat the Bob Taft right and define American conservatism in the last half-century?
For an answer, I think, we have to look beyond tactics like Richard Nixon's opportunistic Southern strategy to the deep structure of modern American politics, which is defined by the toxic interaction of weak political parties with media and money. Evolutionary biologists speak of "exaptation" -- the use of an organ that evolved for one purpose for another purpose in a new environment. Wings, for example, might have developed on feathered dinosaurs for purposes of sexual display before they were used for flight.
The faux-populist corporate conservatism that evolved in the South between the world wars was "exapted" in this sense to flourish in a national politics of weak parties, big media and big money. Helms, like other ideological conservatives, rose to power outside the ranks of the Republican Party machine, with its Elmer Fuddish Northeastern and Midwestern stalwarts like Bob Michel. Helms' career illustrated the confluence of media and money. He began, as we have seen, as a right-wing radio announcer, a proto-Limbaugh. And throughout his career, and now posthumously, he was the beneficiary of free media. Whether he was denouncing Martin Luther King Jr. or Robert Mapplethorpe, Helms knew exactly how to shock the mostly liberal media into showering him with publicity he didn't have to pay for. . . .
In every respect except white supremacy, contemporary America looks more and more like the South between the world wars that Jesse Helms wanted to preserve. We have growing inequality and concentration of wealth, and an elite economic strategy like that of the traditional South that focuses on importing cheap labor, outsourcing manufacturing and exporting commodities (we supply industrial Asia with timber and soybeans). Private-sector unions are all but dead, as in the South. The political parties, as organizations, are weak, as in the South. More and more elected officials are self-funded millionaires or billionaires. Contemporary American politics, like Southern politics past and present, pits elite business-class conservatives against feeble, housebroken elite progressives who are not real threats to entrenched privilege. When, inevitably, the occasional populist protest figure like Perot, Dobbs or Huckabee appears, the affluent progressives quickly close ranks with the corporate conservatives.
Jesse Helms is dead -- but his sinister influence lives on. If you seek his monument, look around.
If after the last couple of weeks you're feeling betrayed by Obama, it's because you allowed yourself to believe that he could stand up to this Orwellian system to which entertainer water carrier types like Helms, Reagan, Limbaugh, and Coulter are best adapted. The whole point of our politics is to create a distraction that prevents real issues of public import from being debated and understood by the general public. And so in rare instances, as in the Iraq War and the FISA controversy, where a vocal opposition arises, it doesn't matter. Power gets what power wants. It will just ram through its program anyway, using flimsy justifications that will create satisfy most people and create enough doubt in others so that any resistance can be dismissed as the dyspepsia of extremists.
That's the system we have, and nothing essential is going to change until money and money-controlled media no longer dominate political discourse. As FW's quote of Chesterton in comments yesterday points out, politics is entertainment in a decadent bread-and-circuses political culture:
It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular."
Crossfire was the perfect embodiment of this sham political fighting as disempowering distraction. It gives the viewer the illusion that he is informed and that he has an opinion insofar as he agrees with one side or the other. But his opinion is meaningless because it doesn't change anything. Power gets what power wants, and, sure, you have a right to your opinion about it, but that's all it is, an impotent opinion--it effects nothing if elite power has its mind made up about it. So while the ship is sinking, we sit in front of the tube or in front of our computers thinking that we are doing something by getting informed or even bloviating about it. But power does as it pleases knowing it will never be seriously threatened or held accountable by the twenty or thirty percent who have a clearer picture about what's going on.
I'm as guilty of the bloviating part of this process as anyone. I'm as guilty as thinking that maybe a guy like Obama could deliver change we can believe in. I'm not arguing that it doesn't make a difference if either he or McCain is elected. There is some latitude for action within the constraints of this system. But he's nevertheless a player in the system that in issues of central importance plays to water carriers like Helms. and his FISA vote was his signal to Power that he will carry water when the interests of Power demand it of him. I'd still rather have him than Clinton. I still think he has more of an upside than she does. But I prefer raspberry jam to strawberry. My preference in either matter has just as much political significance.
So I'm not angry at Obama. He probably believes that he has to pay a price in the short run so that he can make a difference in the long run. But even if he believes that, the rest of us should not. This vote shows us more clearly what kind of change we can believe in. Sorry for being such a downer, but the basic structure of power in this country dictates that people like Helms point to our future more than whatever Obama seems to point to.