Like Matt, I'm a bit surprised to see conservatives heaping praise on Jesse Helms. Helms was an awful bigot with a secondary interest in destroying international institutions and increasing tobacco subsidies. The liberal equivalent would be a Communist fellow traveler who later in life dedicated himself to appropriating money for nominally left wing revolutionary fronts and procuring highway grants. Some of my conservative friends often complain about the difficulty of constructing a "usable history" out of the movement's recent past, and I sympathize with their plight. When leading exemplars of your political tradition were trying to preserve segregation less than four decades ago, it's a bit hard to argue that your party, which is now electorally based in the American South, is really rooted in a cautious empiricism and an acute concern for the deadweight losses associated with taxation. That project would really benefit, however, if more of them would step forward and say that Helms marred the history of their movement and left decent people ashamed to call themselves conservative. The attempt to subsume his primary political legacy beneath a lot of pabulum about "limited government and individual liberty" (which did not apparently include the liberty of blacks to work amongst whites or mingle with other races) is embarrassing. But if it goes unchallenged, what are those of us outside the conservative movement to think?
