Andrew Kopkind

The Jackson Moment

Jesse Jackson woke up on November ninth to find himself the leader of
the largest and most powerful political party in the Western capitalist
world, and the front-runner for its Presidential nomination in 1992. It is
an unwonted and unexpected role. The black Baptist preacher and
Chicago community activist has never held public office. In his two contests for the nomination he was supported by just one white statewide
elected official in the country (Texas Agricultural Commissioner Jim
Hightower, a populist maverick) and endorsed by only a couple of
general-readership newspapers out of thousands. He was cut off without a
penny by most of the Partys customary contributors, he was rebuked or
ignored by much of its white establishment and even at the grass roots he
consistently gathered higher negatives than any other candidate in the
numerous public opinion polls. And yet Jackson not only survived the
Democratic debacle of 1988 but seems the stronger for it.
For five years Jackson had argued, by word and example, that a candidate
of the Centre in the Democratic Party could no longer expect to win
national elections, and certainly not hope to organize a successful national
administration if he did manage to squeak into office on a fluke, as
Jimmy Carter had done after Watergate and Vietnam. Radical transformations in American society over the past quarter-centurythe era of
Republican national electoral triumphhave eliminated the natural
majority the Democrats enjoyed during the New Deal and its aftermath.
Specifically, the experience of racial insurgency, imperial defeat and
deindustrialization (or post-industrialization) detached the constituencies
of white Southerners and northern blue-collar workers from the coalition
that existed at the foundation of the historic Democratic majority. Racial
conflict and economic change led to the rapid and drastic suburbanizaton
of the population. Democratic political machines in the cities and labour
union organizations in the shops rusted along with the infrastructure.
Blacks, Hispanics and recently-arrived ethnics, as well as working-class
women, lesbians and gays, and a growing but unselfconscious white
underclass were isolated, marginalized and excluded from political attention by the Democrats for fear of alarming the new white suburbanites
with talk of expensive welfare programmes, mandatory integration in
housing and education, and cultural liberalization.
The Break-Up of the Democratic Coalition

In fact, the trend was discernible as early as 1948, when the white Dixiecrats, led by South Carolinas Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond,
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bolted from the party over a mildly liberal civil rights platform pushed by
Harry Truman. Although Truman won the Presidency that year, the
white Southerners never really reaffirmed their loyalty to the Party,
although some later voted for Southerner Jimmy Carter for reasons of
regional pride. In the 1950s, both parties facilitated the process of suburbanization by such diverse means as the Defense Highway Act and the
Defense Education Actboth of them using a Cold War, anti-communist
rationale for channeling federal funds to white suburban development. In
a sense, tax dollars paid for the transformation of urban Democrats into
suburban Republicans, for the migrants to the new suburbia soon started
voting for the GOP. The aggressive civil rights movement of the early
1960s, eagerly exploited by northern white liberal Democratic politicians
as a way to drive the entrenched Southern Democrats out of positions of
power in Congress and the party hierarchy, served in quite a contradictory way to remove the white Southern sector of the electorateand
much of the Northern white ethnic sectorfrom the Democratic
coalition. For a time, those essentially racist elements united in a fractional third party under former Alabama Governor George Wallace, but
ultimately they came to rest in the Republican nest under such names as
the Silent Majority of the Nixon years and the Reagan Democrats of
recent memory.
The extensive demographic migration got a big boost in 1972, when all
those whose identity (not to mention their economic security) was heavily
invested in imperial success refused George McGoverns invitation to
celebrate Americas defeat in Vietnam. Jimmy Carters apparent failure
to vanquish the hated Ayatollah Khomeini confirmed the worst fears of
the imperial nostalgics, who can now be counted securely in Republican
ranks. Furthermore, although the children of the sixties were somewhat
cautiously embraced by the Democrats in McGoverns day, during the
1980s the Party actually tried to break up internal caucuses of such postsixties groups as feminists and gays, so that the old guard could rule without factional hindrance. Shut out of the party structures, the descendants
of the sixties movements largely forgot about electoral politicsuntil the
Jackson moment arrived.
The realignment of available, organized constituencies within the two
major parties had again given the Republicans the White House, but that
party remains a minority force in the country at large and in its electoral
institutions. In raw numbers, there are more registered Democrats and
many more unregistered Democrats than there are Republicans, and
governing bodies from both houses of Congress down through state
assemblies and city councils are heavily Democratic. But there are several
factors which seem to prohibit Democrats from utilizing the majority they
could command. In particular, national Democrats have refused to campaign on class and race issues, and at the same time they have rejected
proposals which would widen the electoral pool and bring millions from
the racial minorities, the white poor and other disenfranchised constituencies into the political processand the voting booths.
The act of voting is increasingly unpopular in America, despite the
hoopla, but it was not ever thus. Voter turnout in nineteenth-century
America was more than respectable; a hundred years ago, for instance, 86
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per cent of the eligible electorate outside the South (and 81 per cent overall) voted for president. About that time, however, the political parties
concluded that the citizenry could be better controlled and manipulated
by restricting the voting rolls rather than expanding them. Virtually every
state legislature erected imposing barriers to voting including registration
laws which effectively kept black, ethnic European and working-class
participation to a minimum. It is not easy to vote in most American
locales. People have to register long before election day, and often have to
re-register if they move or if they fail to vote in one or more elections.
Where the authorities would rather that the multitudes do not vote,
registration days are few and far between, registration hours are short or
restricted to the workday, and registration locations are difficult to find
or poorly advertised. Those who have not grown up in the middle-class
political culture (that is to say, millions of recent immigrants, rural
blacks, urban Hispanics, and others in the growing underclass) find the
whole process confusingand usually not worth the trouble. Moreover,
the lack of ideological parties which clearly express class and racial interests leads many people to the quite understandable conclusion that voting
is of absolutely no importance to their lives. Those who make the voting
rules are happy with that state of affairs. As Frances Fox Piven and
Richard Cloward write in their recent study of voting patterns, the
demobilization of lower-strata voters occurred at precisely that time in
our history when the possibilities of electoral politics had begun to
enlarge. Indeed . . . it occurred because the possibilities of popular influence through electoral politics were expanding.1 In other words, as
opportunities opened for blacks and workers (and later, women) to make
demands on the political structure, and as government began to intervene
seriously in economic and social affairs, those most in need of the vote
were denied access to it.
Despite occasional resurgences of voter participation in times of heated
social movement (such as Jacksons registration drive in the South in 1984
or the efforts of the Christian Right in 1980 and 1984), no permanent
remobilization of the lower strata has occurred. The higher strata, however, are pleased to go to the polls in measures comparable with other
countries in Americas political and economic league. Almost 80 per cent
of college graduates regularly votetwice as many as those with only a
grade-school education. More than three-quarters of the people with
incomes above $50,000 a year voteagain, twice as many as those who
earn less than $50,000. Class consciousness is not a subject studied in
much depth in American universities, but a few comparative surveys of
voting behaviour indicate that the half of the electorate that does not vote
here is roughly comparable in attitude to the supporters of the Labour
Party in England and other Euroleft parties on the Continent. If thats the
case, any significant expansion of the participating electorate would move
the entire political system to the left and realign the parties. Since only
about half of the eligible population now votes in quadrennial presidential elections (and the figure is much, much lower for less important contests), it is no longer meaningful to describe the American political mood
or political opinion in terms of the election returns. When the media
spout clichs such as America gave George Bush a mandate for the
1

Why Americans Dont Vote, New York 1988.

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continuation of conservative policies, it can only mean that a plurality of

rather well-to-do, middle-aged or elderly educated white votersrepresenting about a quarter of the potential electoratevoted for George
Bush. (In fact, deeper analyses of American political consciousness, in
particular Tom Ferguson and Joel Rogers landmark study, Right Turn,
showed that there was no consensus in the country for Ronald Reagans
right-wing policies, as opposed to his presidential personality.) Referring
to the plurality in an American presidential election as America is a little
like calling the white voters for P.W. Bothas Nationalist Party, South
Africa.
The Funding Priorities

What limited expansion of the Democratic Party that has occurred in the
Jackson direction has caused anxiety in the ranks of political cliques in
power from Manhattan to Mississippi. Expansion is a form of empowerment which allows members of the enlarged electorate to participate in
the political dynamic beyond single issues of self-interest. Although
Governor Michael Dukakis promised last summer to give Jackson the
wherewithal to run a vast voter-registration drive, in fact very few resources (in money and personnel) were ever forthcoming and in most areas
Democratic registration actually decreased between 1984 and 1988.
Dukakiss fund-raisers, led by the effective Boston lawyer Robert Farmer,
filled a campaign war chest with almost $30 million before Dukakis even
went to be nominated at the national convention in Atlanta. It was the
most money, by far, that any Democrat had ever raised, and indeed it was
said that Dukakis won the important first primaryfundraisingthat
led to his later victories in the primaries of the winter and spring of 1988.
Although a great deal of the money was spent on the primary campaigns,
a hefty sum was available for the general election, and more was being
raised every day until 8 November. Because of recent reforms in campaign financing, and because of the institution of federally-financed
general elections (both Bush and Dukakis got about $46 million apiece),
much of the money Dukakis raised had to be spent in a roundabout way,
so as not to be charged directly to his campaign. The scam was to conduit
those millions to local Democratic parties in the several states, which then
became nominal party development committees, but actually worked as
DukakisBentsen organizationswithout legal spending limits. In Illinois, for instance, the official Dukakis committee employed five or six
workers as the campaign ended; the state party development group had
about 115 paid staff.
Despite the fact that they were working for Dukakis, many of the people
in charge of the state parties had been in favour of one of the other white
candidates in the primaries. Few from the Jackson campaign were integrated into the local Dukakis efforts. For the most part, the locals did not
have the slightest interest in registering new voters from the black and
white underclass. Local Democrats enjoy the privileges they have as party
leaders. They know that expansion of their own state electorates can only
mean trouble down the road. The threat from a Jackson-inspired insurgency looms larger than any benefit they might receive from a large turnout in a presidential election. In fact, most of them have no particular
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stake in the formation of a Democratic Administration in Washington.

Even the occasional pork barrel projects and federal grants they get for
their districts are controlled by the Congress, which is likely to remain
solidly Democratic no matter who wins the Presidency. Most Democratic senators and representatives in leadership roles would probably
prefer that a Republican be in the White House, so as not to limit their
sway over Congress. In Americas tripartite system, Senator Ted Kennedy or House Speaker Jim Wright, for example, are far more important as leaders of the Congressional government under a Bush
administration than they would be as Congressional subordinates of a
Dukakis administation. (Republicans, on the other hand, have no hope
of running both houses of Congress in the foreseeable future, so most
Republican senators and representatives would have more visibility and
power under a Republican president than they would as minority members of Congress.) Leaders of the Democratic Congressional government did not kill themselves campaigning for the ticket in the recent
election. The reason was not that figures such as Senator Sam Nunn of
Georgia or Governor (and Senator-elect) Charles Robb of Virginia
Lyndon Johnsons son-in-lawdisliked Dukakiss platform or his ideological position, whatever it was. The fact is that they were perfectly
pleased to see him lose. America is moving into a weird, seat-of-thepants stage of pre-parliamentary government, in which the government
in Congress competes with the government in the White House. Lately,
Congress has been in charge.
Dukakiss strategists had always counted on a low-turnout election, and
nothing they did later in the campaign changed that course. After Dukakis was elected for a third (non-consecutive) term as Governor of Massachusetts in November 1986, his chief political adviser, John Sasso, drew
up a long memorandum setting out the plan and the rationale for a Dukakis run for the Presidency in 1988. Sasso accepted the size and shape of
the electorate as it looked in early 1987 and argued that to win the following year Dukakis had only to transfer a number of Reagan Democrats,
i.e. Southern whites and Northern ethnics, from the Republican to the
Democratic column. Dukakis was instructed to run a suburban campaign, which entailed the elimination of black and lower-strata issues
from his political agenda. Voter registration among those constituencies
would obviously be a low-order priority, for any appeal to minorities and
the poor could alienate suburban voters; or so the theory went.
Sassos view of politics was static and very much influenced by currently
fashionable political science of the quantifiable kind. Jackson took a much
more dynamic, transformative approach. He began to redefine the parties in ideological terms, to bring in millions of previously apolitical citizens, and to create a permanent movement that might someday take over
the Democratic Partyas the right wing took over the Republican Party
between 1960 and 1980. The populist part of Jacksons project was that
his movement would be built from the bottom up rather than the top
down, and the leadership would be made accountable to its base. That, of
course, is the problematic part. The Jackson movement, which is both
more and less than the Rainbow Coalition which he leads, is much more
authentic an expression of popular demands than any other campaign in
America since the original Populist efforts at the turn of the century, but
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it is also a traditional Democratic Party campaign, and it is doubtful that

the bottom will ever control the top.
Class and Race

Jacksons importance in the last five years has been his direct engagement
of class and race and his strategy of electoral expansion. Beginning in the
summer of 1983, Jackson set out to change the course of politics in the
South, that most resistent of all regions. Touring the burgeoning cities,
the dusty towns and the steaming cotton counties from the Carolinas to
the Mississippi Delta, he convinced, cajoled and in some cases almost
dragged blacks to registration desks and polling places with such success
that more than two million new voters entered the political process for the
first time. Not only that, but blacks were encouraged and organized to
run for office in a conscious plan to form the basis of a progressive bloc
within the Democratic Party at both the local and national levels. By the
election of 1984, the strategy had developed well enough to buck the
Reagan landslide and provide the margin of victory for two white Southern senatorsHowell Heflin of Alabama and Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee, and to contribute decisively in the North (where registration drives
and bloc-building were also underway) to the elections of liberals Paul
Simon of Illinois and Carl Levin in Michigan. Then in 1986, when
Reaganism was in decline, the Jackson strategy paid off handsomely.
Eight more Democrats were elected in the South with Jacksons new
voters providing the edge. Not one of them had a majority of the white
vote in their state; indeed, only oneTerry Sanford of North Carolina
got more than forty per cent of it. In addition, voters across the slowly
widening spectrum of the Rainbow Coalition were decisive in reelecting
the liberal Alan Cranston in California. Whats more, for the first time in
a decade young blacks voted in higher proportions than young whites. No
less authority than George Bushs campaign manager, Lee Atwater (himself a Southerner), was impressed. Its a tribute to Jesse Jackson, he told
the Washington Post. These are voters hes been targeting for the last four
to five years, and I didnt realize he was as effective as he apparently was.
All in all, it could be said that Jackson and the Rainbow gave the Senate
back to the Democrats (after a brief Republican reign during the early
Reagan years) and made possible a new liberal politics in the dying days
of the Reagan Administration.
Previous blocs of blacks, workers, farmers and others the likes of which
Jackson calls the dispossessed were delivered to Democratic candidates
and then ignored on policy matters until the next election. But the new
Rainbow voters (for want of a better name) were kept in a kind of permanent if hypothetical caucus by Jackson and his political organizers, until
such time as they could be used for leverage on an important issue. The
first national test of the caucuss strength came with Reagans nomination
of the rightist Robert Bork to be a justice of the Supreme Court. More
than a mere confirmation contest, it was a comeback fight for liberals
who hadnt won a big one since the early 1970s. One after another, Southern Democrats who wouldnt have dreamed of supporting Northern
liberals in a straight ideological struggle ten or twenty years ago, now
joined in the vote against Bork. Three previous Reaganite appointments
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to the Court had been confirmed. Bork was beaten. The difference, this
time, was Jackson.
At the moment of maximum opportunity during the Senate hearings on
the Bork nomination, Jackson himself came to call on Senator Heflin of
Alabama, the lone deep-Southern Democrat on the Judiciary Committee,
and arguably the key to the entire confirmation process. Without nays
from all or most of the conservative Democrats who customarily oppose
affirmative action for minority interests, sexual equality, rights of privacy
and restrictions on the policeand support judges of like mindsBork
would almost certainly be seated. The Southerners, as well as a few wavering Republicans, were likely to follow Heflins lead. Heflin came out of
the hearings to greet Jackson in an anteroom. Good morning, Reverend,
the Senator said graciously to the Preacher; weve been expecting you.
The two men chatted amiably about matters on their mind: Bork and his
record, Southern politics, and what Heflin delicately referred to as the feelings of the new voters in the region. Jacksons presence implicitly reminded
Howell that he had been elected by those Rainbow voters. By the time
Jackson left, he knew that Heflin would stand against the nomination.
As he prepared to run again for the Presidency in 1988, Jackson shifted
his focus from the black community to a much more difficult populist
constituency, with an appeal based on class rather than racial issues. He
set up headquarters for the important Iowa caucus campaign (the first of
the pre-election primary season) in the tiny town of Greenfield, in lovely
farm country seized by the full-blown crisis of American agriculture:
monopolization by corporate agribusiness, restriction of credit for small
farmers, elimination of the family farm, residential and commercial
development of the rural countryside, and pollution, degradation and
depletion of agricultural resources. While six of the Democratic candidates offered one or another remedial policy or minor reform, Jackson
campaigned on a programme of political empowerment for the rural
constituency.
Jacksons approach to the farm crisis presents a useful illustration of his
new populist/progressive politics. The approaching demise of the family
farm system cannot be averted by managerial manoeuvres or market gimmicks, he suggested, but requires a wholesale assault on the political
economy of agriculture. The Reagan Administration has accelerated a
process that began decades ago, in which the family farm is being
replaced by megafarms increasingly owned by absentee management
firms and agribusiness corporations. Some firms are building vertical
monopolies in the industry with land as the bottom layer of a structure
that will include feed lots for cattle, meat-packing houses, machinery
manufacturing plants, grain-exporting companies, supermarkets and
shopping mallsall in a transnational system. Like Stalinism in Russia in
the 1930s, Reaganism in America in the 1980s seeks to rationalize agriculture to respond to centralized planning and presumed economies of
scale. Here, of course, the centralization is corporate rather than collective, and the economies are meant to benefit the corporate class rather
than the collective masses. But many of the methods of forced removal of
farmers and the consequences to the traditional communities contain
chilling parallels.
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No kulaks have been shot in Iowa (although there are many suicides), but
tens of thousands of families have been driven from their homes, many
after three, four or five generations, and sent to distant towns where they
shovel chicken manure out of poultry factories, or shovel fast food to
customers in roadside stands. In many cases they migrate to the losing
end of the agricultural chain they once helped forge. Unless radical
reforms are instituteda most unlikely prospect, to be surehalf of the
farms in Iowa will go under in the next ten years. What Jackson calls a
new feudalism is settling over the rural heartland. Farmers default on
their loans; banks and insurance companiesand sometimes government
agenciesforeclose; sometimes they burn and bulldoze the lovely old
white farmhouses, the barns, the silos and the stand of trees that protected
the homestead from the prairie winds. Scorching the earth saves money
by lowering property taxes. Families who simply cannot tear themselves
from their birthplace are sometimes allowed to stay on the land by the
new farm-management companies or megafarmers in return for work
done. The new tenants represent the saddest sector of a shift in productive relations that will amount to billions, or perhaps trillions of dollars
by the end of the century.
Changing the Equation

On the trail in Iowa, Jackson excited voters more by promising them participation in the power structurethe organizing principle of the old
civil rights movementthan by offering them specific programmes and
policies to cure their complaints. Unlike most of the other Democrats
campaigning in the state, he did not hurl a string of neoliberal proposals
from the hustings. His delivery was at once personal and political rather
than procedural and managerial. For example, he told a crowd of recently
laid-off workers in Iowa Falls that we must change the equation. Theres
no sense of corporate justice, of fairness. Wed better wake up and fight
to stop the merger maniacs. The town was reeling from the decision of
Farmland Foods to close its pork packing plant and idle one-quarter of
the local industrial work force. The all-white audience responded to the
class appeal and crossed the line of race, as Jackson hoped, to support
the black candidate.
Jackson did well in the Iowa caucuses that winter. (In the confusing and
arcane caucus election in that state, voters registered with a party go to
a small community meeting one night in February and line upphysicallyunder placards designated for each of the candidates.) He actually
won or came in a close second (in the seven-man race) in the places, such
as Greenfields Adair County, where he concentrated his organization.
Overall, he broke into double digits in the percentage of votes and
established himself as a viable player in the 1988 Democratic electoral
game. A few weeks later, in the many primaries held on Super Tuesday,
Jackson won several statesand most big citiesand helped eliminate
most of the remaining white candidates. He broadened his class campaign to include white workers in decaying industries and those in the
Reagan class who have been forced to take low-paying, dead-end jobs in
the so-called service sectorthe area where employment has increased in
the last decade. He talked about the difficulty of the workers lives, about
the degraded quality of work, and about the powerlessness of the working
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poor as a class: all in terms entirely new to American politics, at least

since the Roosevelt era. Jackson often spoke to eight or nine audiences in
a day, sometimes travelling over an area of tens or hundreds or even
thousands of miles (jet-campaigning came of age in this election), each
time combining revivalist emotion, populist-coalition politics and civil
rights struggle rhetoric in a remarkable political performance. We work
every day, he reminded the crowds, who invariably responded with
knowing assent. And we are still poor. We pick up your garbage; we work
every day. We drive your cars, we take care of your children, we empty
your bed-pans, we pick up your garbage, we sweep your apartments; we
work every day. We cook your food, and we dont have time to cook our
own. We change your hospital beds and wipe your fevered brow and we
cant afford to lie in that bed when we get sick. We work every day. By
the end of the speech the nods of approval were mixed with tears.
As millions of Americans saw when Jackson spoke at the Democratic
Convention in Atlanta last summer, the appeal to class and the
description of work tapped emotions and released energies as no other
politician in memory has been able to do. The reality of work never gets
mentioned in political parlance. Then Jackson comes along and talks in
simply eloquent terms about the quality of ordinary lives and the whole
country stopsand weeps. At the end of the long season of primaries,
Jackson had won elections or caucuses in almost every important city in
the country (including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston and
Los Angeles), a majority of the states of the Deep South, as well as Michigan, Maine, Vermont, Alaska and other Northern states where a winning
black candidacy had been thought impossible. He had mobilized millions
of voters on a platform of economic justice, racial justice, and the
realignment of Americas relations with the Third World. In Atlanta, his
forces raised previously taboo subjects, such as Palestinian rights, soakthe-rich taxation and significant restraint in military projects and expenditures. One-third of the delegates to the convention were members of the
Rainbow, most of them black. There was a populist look and feel to the
place such as had not been seen in American politics since the first election of Andrew Jackson (no kin), more than a hundred and fifty years
ago. So impressive was the Jackson presence that Dukakis was forced to
negotiate an Atlanta Pact promising the Jackson forces a prominent role
in the campaign and in the administration if Dukakis won, plus support
for Jackson on a number of special items on the Rainbow agenda: voter
registration, radical reform of registration laws, sanctions against South
Africa, statehood for the predominantly black District of Columbia.
(Dukakis quickly broke all of his promises, but thats another story.) Jackson lost the nomination (although he gained more votes than any losing
candidate in history) but his moment had come, and no one doubts that
another will come again.

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