A Case for Jackson

A Case for Jackson

Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign marks a historic breakthrough in American politics. It is the first time that a “social democratic” platform has been presented in the mainstream of American politics and attracted significant mass support. The journalistic cliché was, and is, that Jackson’s program is “extremist,” vague, outrageously expensive. In fact, as a correspondent for the London Financial Times reported, only in Ronald Reagan’s America could Jackson’s eminently moderate and sensible ideas be seen as far out. Those ideas, on full employment, health, North-South and the like, are familiar to readers of Dissent, members of Democratic Socialists of America, and the broad democratic left. They are, more or less, what we have been talking about during the past decade and in some cases the people who articulated them for Jackson came from our world.

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