Just who is Rep. Joe Wilson?

That’s the question everyone was googling after they heard the lone congressman angrily berate the president during Wednesday’s address to the joint session of Congress. And though he was quick to offer a perfunctory apology, that didn’t stop the previously obscure South Carolina pol from going viral in the amount of time it took Joe Scarborough to tweet: “Whoever shouted out that the president was lying is a dumbass.”

As it turned out, however, Wilson is a man with a rather interesting past. The last time he made waves was in 2003, after the death of Sen. Strom Thurmond, when Wilson told The State it was “unseemly” for Essie Mae Washington-Williams to reveal that she was the love-child of the deceased centegenarian.

The reason Wilson was asked for his opinion on the Thurmond revelations, and the reason why he held such a strong view about Strom’s integrity, was that he was an aide to Thurmond in the 1980s. This is a fascinating example of how, the further we become removed as a nation from the often poisonous, noxious politics of Old Right (which saw little wrong in flirting with southern segregationists or supporting oppressive regimes such as South Africa’s apartheid government), the extent to which certain aspects of the rejected ideology have seeped into our political bloodstream becomes clearer. Wilson’s political roots, like those of many intractable critics of the Obama administration, have been fertilized in the same soil that gave birth to some of the more shameful episodes of U.S. history.

Last January, South Carolina Republican Chairman Katon Dawson came within votes of becoming the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Dawson, aside from having to deal with controversy concerning his past membership in an all-white country club, would publicly speak of how his ideology was formed and is still shaped by bitterness over school integration: “I remember how blatant it was ... that government just thought they knew better what to do in my school.”

Sarah Palin is perhaps the politician today most emblematic of how the narrative of the Old Right still scars our national discourse. It’s forgotten now amid the cavalcade of ridiculous she’s released on the nation, but in 1992 Palin was an avid supporter of Pat Buchanan, the last great champion of the paleoconservative cause. And on the campaign trail, Palin would spout quotes from Westbrook Pegler, a conservative columnist from the middle of the century who, when he wasn’t waxing poetic about small town folksiness, was penning right-wing opinions so extreme even the John Birch Society wrote him off as a nut.

One likes to think, especially after the 2008 election, that we’ve moved beyond the worst elements of our past. But it can’t be forgotten that words, actions and ideas often have a life span that bears little relation to their usefulness. And it’s always true that the more things change, the more they stay the same. We’ll always have some Joe Wilson’s around, no matter how much we think we’ve evolved.

Editorials Editor Asher Smith is a College junior from Great Neck, N.Y.