Transcript: What Today’s Democrats Can Learn from Jesse Jackson |
Transcript: What Today’s Democrats Can Learn from Jesse Jackson
Danielle Wiggins, a historian at Georgetown University, says Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 campaigns used rhetoric, tactics and policy that would greatly benefit Democrats today.
This is a lightly edited transcript of the February 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: We’re going to talk about Jesse Jackson today. He passed away today, obviously, as you probably saw. We’re going to talk about his life, his legacy, and a little bit about politics of today and what things he did in the eighties and nineties might tell us about the future. So Danielle, thanks for joining me.
Danielle Wiggins: It’s great to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
Bacon: So I want to start with sort of the politics part for lack of a better way to say that. You wrote this essay in Boston Review that came out earlier this month. And you argued that Democrats today, who are trying to think about where they should go and what they should do, should take some lessons from the ’84 and ’88 campaigns of Reverend Jackson. Talk about what you mean in that context.
Wiggins: Yeah, so I wrote that essay in response to a piece by Jacob Grumbach and Adam Bonica that basically argued that the Democrats should abandon what is an increasingly failing policy of moderation, which I happen to agree with. And I kind of came at it through this historical lens by thinking about Jesse Jackson’s critiques of the Democrats’ initial turn to the center in the 1980s during the Reagan era.
And I show how Jesse Jackson understood very early on that the people who would be most harmed by moderation, by compromising with conservatism, by compromising with. the Reagan administration, the people that would be most harmed by that would be poor minority people, people who were already kind of victims of Reagan’s cuts to social programs and his kind of general politics of moderation.
And so I suggest that he kind of offered an alternative vision to the centrist sort of politics that was being proposed by moderate Democrats in the Democratic Leadership Council in the mid-1980s. And it was based really on a social democratic, populist agenda that sought to unite what he called a Rainbow Coalition.
He also used the allusion of a quilt. He liked using metaphors quite a bit as the country preacher but it would unite these disparate groups. Obviously racial minorities who he had been organizing for most of his career, but also dispossessed farmers, displaced workers, gay and lesbian populations who were being harmed by Reagan’s ignoring of the AIDS crisis.
He also included immigrants and the disabled and environmentalists and young people in this in this coalition that he called the Rainbow Coalition that was united by a shared grievance and a shared experience of harm by what he called “economic violence.”
And he kind of described economic violence as these policies and practices of austerity that really kind of were creating and deepening the wealth gap in the United States in the 1980s. And so he believed that this coalition could be mobilized.
And many of them—if we think about African Americans in particular—were kind of demobilized in the Reagan era. They were kind of very turned off by the Jimmy Carter administration and his kind of failure to keep the promises that he had made about full employment and his kind of walking away from kind of a more robust urban economic development program.
So they were kind of, demobilized by the Carter era and were falling out of political participation, particularly at the national level. And so Jackson believed that these people who had been dejected and demobilized and kind of didn’t see themselves as part of the political populace anymore could be mobilized and could kind of create a coalition that would be powerful enough to defeat Reaganism.
Bacon: Let me stop you to say this in the most reductive way possible, ’cause I’m a journalist. In some ways, Jackson was an early critic of a lot of the sort of what we call, like, neoliberal economic policies.
And today, in some ways, the Democratic Party has sort of caught up to him. You see Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or AOC—even Biden at times. You’re seeing a Democratic Party that’s kind of moved away, at least pre-2024. From 2018 to 2024, you saw a move toward what Jackson was talking about, right? He’s critiquing neoliberalism. Is that a good way to think about it?
Wiggins: Yeah, of course he wouldn’t call it neoliberalism; I think he would call it kind of a milquetoast sort of moderation. That was abandoning sort of the “New Politics” approach of the 1970s—meaning a sort of political coalition building that centered people that had previously been marginalized prior to the Voting Rights Act.
But yeah, absolutely. He was kind of criticizing the rising power of corporations in the Democratic Party, the rising professionalization. And as I said before, he was very critical of the tendency to moderate and weaken policies and principles to appeal to this mythic, mainstream centrist voter who was imagined by these DLC—these Democratic Leadership Council members—as white, middle-class, suburban Sun Belt [voters].
Bacon: And to read your essay... I assume we’re in the same place again. Your essay argues the Democrats can win by mobilizing the marginalized and having a real agenda for humans or people. And we’re again at this point where… I don’t know who the DLC of today is. We have a lot of consultants and so on.
So they would come to you with this, like: The median voter is a white man who’s over 50 and who didn’t have a college degree, who thinks Democrats are too woke and who may [like] Trump a lot.
So how do you respond to that? Because we’re still having the same argument today. Like what makes... because in the eighties, Reverend Jackson could not win, in part because he faced the sort of white centrist argument: We’re too left, the special interests have taken over the party. We’re in the same arguments today. So how do you respond to that today? ’Cause we’re having the same version of the same arguments today.
Wiggins: Yeah, well, I would definitely cite the work of Jacob Grumbach and…
Wiggins: Sorry. Adam Bonica. Thank you. Yeah. Jacob Grumbach, Adam Bonica. Yes. Who I’ve kind of shown using kind of social scientific they’re political scientists. So they have the data to suggest that that tack is not working anymore.
They argue that it worked in the 1990s—that the tactic of triangulation worked. Bill Clinton being the most famous example, but they also show that it worked on kind of local and state-level races as well. But they have shown that that isn’t working anymore. So there’s social science, there’s political scientific data to suggest that that is a losing game.
But I think as a historian, I would argue that that has never worked for people at the margins.
Bacon: It was always bad for Black people, even if it helped Bill Clinton win the election, maybe. Or we can debate that.
Wiggins: Exactly. So Bill Clinton, you know, the “first Black president,” I guess—very popular among African American voters. But, this is the expansion of the carceral state under Clinton, the evisceration of welfare, a distancing from the legacy of civil rights within a Democratic Party. A kind of reformulation of it.
And so my argument would be that it’s never worked and that it has come at the expense of Black, poor, and other marginalized people.
I’ve also been, like many other people, very attuned to the Zohran Mamdani campaign and kind of seeing a lot of echoes of the Jackson campaign in that campaign, particularly in how he was communicating with people and the way that he sort of mobilized a very clear moral vision that people could kind of grab onto and become excited about.
And so I think........