Explaining Jesse Jackson

The most important impact of Jesse Jackson’s campaign has been his ability to fashion for black Americans a parity-status within the Democratic party. A parity-status with regard to a political party is the opposite of a client-status. It entails the coalescence of relatively sovereign groups or interests. Parity-status is what white ethnic groups carved out for themselves within the Democratic party in an earlier period. The Irish did so first by the 1920s, though not consolidating the...