30 Years Later, It Looks Like Jesse Jackson Won the Economic Argument |
30 Years Later, It Looks Like Jesse Jackson Won the Economic Argument
The civil rights icon’s progressive ideas were sidelined during the centrist Clinton years, but they’re ascendant in the Democratic Party today.
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........