30 Years Later, It Looks Like Jesse Jackson Won the Economic Argument

It seems genteel and quaint today, compared to what we’re living through now, but at the time, to a lot of people, the Reagan revolution was shocking. He and his movement launched a massive assault on everything liberalism had advanced in the previous two decades: civil rights, women’s rights, concern for the environment, opposition to an immoral war (Vietnam) and excessive militarism, and more.

Reagan also took aim at other, fatter targets: inflation, the disappearance of Rust Belt jobs, an America exposed as weakened by OPEC and Iran; rising crime, an explosion of welfare rolls, and the general sense that the country was in collapse. One expected a conservative Republican to attack all these. But Reagan went out of his way to undermine the whole project of twentieth-century liberalism, appointing people to run pieces of the executive branch who were outright hostile to those agencies’ missions. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pam Bondi are bad, no doubt about that; but go read up on James Watt and Ed Meese and Anne Gorsuch Burford (yes, she has a certain son who is prominent today).

Democrats and liberals were on their heels. The congressional Democratic Party of the early 1980s was still more like it was in the 1930s than it is today—that is, it was a hybrid of Northern and Western liberals and Boll Weevil Southerners who were raised on the New Deal but were turning increasingly conservative. So a lot of them voted for most parts of the Reagan program.

A few stalwart liberals like Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy stood their ground (most of the time). But one man did more.

Jesse Jackson, who died Tuesday, was certainly famous then—first for having been there on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and for his civil rights activism in subsequent years. But he was still just the head of Operation PUSH, a Chicago-based social service and activist organization. And he decided that someone needed to be the voice of those the Reagan revolution had trampled—the Black and brown and poor; the white farmer (he campaigned a lot in farm country); the people whose supposed moral shortcomings were being constantly denounced on the then-new medium of cable news television, even as new shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous celebrated the “morals” of the new rich class, like the huckster who built that temple to his own ego at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.

So Jackson ran for president in 1984 in the Democratic primaries. It was clear from the start that Walter Mondale, a respected senator and former vice president whose “turn” it was that year, was going to be the nominee. Gary Hart, then a young senator from Colorado, also ran, challenging Mondale mostly on generational arguments. Five senators’ campaigns lasted into late February and early March.

But Jackson ran the full race. He won two contests—Louisiana and, oh yeah, the District of Columbia—and collected 3.3 million votes. He built and energized something called “the Black vote,” which wasn’t really a thing nationally until 1984, and his campaign rhetoric about a “rainbow coalition” reminded Americans that the Reagan movement, while popular and very easily reelected, was leaving millions of Americans behind.

That laid the groundwork for 1988. In 1984, Jackson ran to make a statement. In 1988, though, he was running to try to win. He didn’t; Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis did. But he finished second—ahead of prominent Democrats Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, and Paul Simon—with 13 victories, 6.9 million votes, and more than 1,000 delegates.

Jackson never really seemed like he was truly going to win. But I do remember his massive victory in the late-March Michigan caucuses. That shocked people, and it put a scare into the party establishment. Three weeks later came the big New York primary. I was a young political reporter in New York at the time, and I remember those weeks well. If Jackson could somehow win New York, would people have to start taking seriously the idea that he could be the nominee?

He got the progressive unions, and he spoke at large, boisterous rallies. But in the end the establishment rallied behind Dukakis, and Jackson finished a distant second (but still way ahead of Gore, who ran an embarrassingly Israel-centric campaign). He petered out toward the end of the primaries but had done enough to earn a marquee speaking slot at the convention, where he delivered a barn burner (he was one of the great political orators of our time). And his campaigns were the glue that brought a lot of up-and-coming progressives together for the first time. I remember Harold Ickes, then a top Jackson aide, telling me to keep my eye on a young state senator from Maryland who was working on the campaign. His name was Jamie Raskin.

So Jackson was the leader of the party’s progressive wing. At the same time, though, something was brewing in the party’s stronger establishment wing: Al From founded the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985, and he hitched the centrist DLC’s wagon to the talented Bill Clinton, and the rest is history.

Despite representing very different politics, Jackson and Clinton always kind of liked each other, and Jackson, of course, still wanted to be a player. So he invited Clinton to come speak to his Rainbow Coalition conference in Washington in June 1992. I was there that day. It was a normal speech for about 15 minutes, nothing special, and then Clinton started in on this riff about this obscure rapper named Sister Souljah—condemning her quote about killing white people. There was no mystery about what Clinton was up to—pundits had been after him for weeks to “stand up to the special interests.” Jackson, at a press conference shortly after Clinton left, was clearly annoyed. But within a month, Jackson endorsed Clinton. “It takes two wings to fly,” I remember Jackson saying regularly at the time, reminding the dominant centrists that there were Democrats who were leery of free trade, angry about this new problem of income inequality, perfectly happy with big government, and eager to see their party defend unions and workers.

The centrists called the shots for a long time. But 30 years on, who’s won that economic argument? On the four matters I name above, and a few more, it’s Jackson’s positions that are today ascendant. And it all traces back to his brave decision to confront Reaganism head-on at the precise moment that it was at its most triumphant. Jackson was a man of many accomplishments, and yes, a fair share of flaws. But for that decision, he deserves our thanks, and history’s respect.