Fragile Democracy by James L. Leloudis

Author:James L. Leloudis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Old Wine, New Vessels

By the mid-1980s, North Carolina once again had a tightly contested two-party political system. A visitor from a similar time a century before would have been confounded by the way that party labels had flipped. Democrats now resembled the party of Lincoln, and Republicans looked like Democrats of old. But the visitor would easily have recognized the competing social visions the parties offered voters. One party stressed the importance of balancing individual rights against social responsibility, contended that government had an indispensable role to play in promoting the general welfare, and viewed the prerogatives of citizenship as the birthright of every American. The other party was wary of government infringement on personal choice and thought of equal citizenship as a privilege to be earned rather than an entitlement. In a society that for most of its history had stood on a foundation of slavery and Jim Crow, contests over these competing ideals were centered, more often than not, on the question of racial equality. Conservatives—whatever their party label—took a narrow view on that issue, partly out of racial animus but also because they understood that black enfranchisement led to progressive social policies.

This was at no time more obvious than in 1984 and 1990, when U.S. senator Jesse Helms faced two Democratic challengers: Governor James B. Hunt Jr. in the first contest, and, in the second, former Charlotte mayor Harvey B. Gantt.

After his first-term election in 1972, Helms had quickly established himself as a leading spokesman of the new Republican Party that was ascendant in North Carolina and across the nation. He did so by holding true to what I. Beverly Lake Sr. had described as the “eternal principles” of southern conservatism. Helms championed individualism and free enterprise; he opposed labor unions and attributed inequality to the values and behaviors of people who lived on society's margins; and he characterized social welfare programs as instruments of theft that rewarded the takers rather than the makers of wealth. “A lot of human beings have been born bums,” Helms famously declared at the height of the civil rights movement and war on poverty. “Most of them—until fairly recently—were kept from behaving like bums because work was necessary for all who wished to eat. The more we remove penalties for being a bum, the more bumism is going to blossom.”58

Helms had a talent for capturing the anger of white Americans who felt aggrieved by their fellow citizens’ demands for rights and respect. He was also an innovative campaigner. His North Carolina Congressional Club, founded in 1978, was a fund-raising juggernaut that pioneered targeted political advertising of the sort that began with mass mailing in Helms's era and today is conducted via the internet and social media. Added to all of that, Helms was unwavering in his convictions. Supporters and adversaries alike knew him as “Senator No.” He was, in the words of one sympathetic biographer, “an uncompromising ideologue.”59

Jim Hunt, Helms's opponent in 1984, was cut from different cloth. Born in 1937,

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