Jesse Jackson Reshaped the Democratic Party

In the spring of 1983, as the Democratic Party searched for a way out of Reaganite obscurity, Jesse Jackson was a long-shot candidate for the party’s presidential nomination — at least in the eyes of much of the political establishment. But in June of the same year, The Nation treated his “embryonic campaign” as more than a far-fetched curiosity. Jackson’s bid for the nomination, the editors wrote, had already come to “symbolize a new dimension of black electoral power,” one that “threatens to reshape the Democratic Party as it stumbles toward the end of the century.”

From the beginning, the magazine treated Jackson’s campaign as a development with significant implications for the future of the party and the country. This risked having a “disruptive effect” on the Democratic status quo. After years of unconvincing and morally indefensible right-wing feints, it was time: For decades, liberals had relied on black and other minority voters as a reliable base—“safe and stable,” in fact. The Nation» – then relegate them to the margins once the campaigns are won. In what Jackson called the nascent Rainbow Coalition, by contrast, the candidate sketched the contours of something more ambitious and more enduring — a coalition of “poor people of all races, of the unemployed, of women, of Hispanics,” of millions of Americans “floating on the margins of the mainstream.”

The enthusiasm was real, but there were tensions within the Rainbow Coalition and the writers of the The NationThe pages debated it at length. In early 1984, after Jewish organizations accused Jackson of bigotry—charges related both to offensive rhetorical missteps (referring to New York as “Hymietown”) and, perhaps more pointedly, to his support for Palestinian rights—Philip Green came to Jackson’s defense, arguing that some of the allegations blurred the line between anti-Semitism and legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. He noted that Jackson apologized for his remarks. “An apology by mistake is exactly as much as we need,” Green argued. “So we must join him in protesting what he calls media ‘harassment.’ It is worth remembering that there is only one candidate in the Democratic race who identifies Jews as a specific part of his constituency in almost all of his campaign speeches. That candidate is Jesse Jackson.”

In response, Paul Berman issued a lengthy rejoinder, titled “Jackson and the Left: Across the Rainbow,” arguing that Jackson’s “problematic rhetoric” and associations could not be so easily dismissed. “The more support Jackson receives, the stronger he will emerge from the election,” Berman predicted, “the more difficulty and nastiness there may be for progressive politics in the future.”

Jackson’s campaign forced a debate not only within the Democratic Party but also within the left itself – about solidarity and responsibility, the limits of legitimate criticism of Israel and the persistence of anti-Semitism.

In the summer of 1984, as Jackson’s first presidential campaign failed, the magazine’s tone hardened and postmortem recriminations began to appear. In July, an essay by Andrew Kopkind and Alexander Cockburn titled “The Left, the Democrats, and the Future” indicted white progressives for what he saw as a loss of courage. “Long before Louis Farrakhan made headlines,” the authors write, “white leftists had used every possible excuse to withhold support from the black candidate.” The objections came one after the other: Jackson was too radical, too inexperienced, too divisive. The “dark motif” of the 1984 campaign had “shifted from Anybody But Reagan to Anybody But Jackson.” “Once again,” Kopkind and Cockburn concluded, “racism has destroyed the promise of a populist, progressive, internationalist coalition within the Democratic Party.”

In the years that followed, The Nation reported on the positive effects that followed the failure of Jackson’s first campaign. In November 1987, Kopkind traced how Jackson’s 1983-1984 registration drives inflated black turnout and strengthened Democrats in the midterms. The Rainbow Coalition, despite Jackson’s defeat in the primaries, had moved from a simple slogan to a truly assertive progressive Democratic base. “Few politicians or political commentators who are not on the left margins of society take the Rainbow Coalition seriously as a potential force in national affairs, even if they are impressed and a little frightened by Jackson’s personal popularity,” Kopkind observed. “Not everyone knows yet how far the coalition campaign can go this time, and no one is sure.”

In 1988, pushed by Kopkind and others, the magazine moved from merely analyzing Jackson’s campaign to wholeheartedly supporting Jackson for the Democratic nomination: