In Memoriam Judith Stein and Jane McAlevey*

A perceptive friend and colleague observed shortly after Jesse Jackson’s death, amidst the flood of extravagant proclamations of his larger-than-life significance as a force for left or progressive politics:

it occurred to me why Jackson is getting such fond eulogies from so many sources. He was basically proleptic: He represented no viable movement but stood up, made noise, issued political proclamations in a variety of registers (black identitarian, popular front, leftist), all the while extorting money from deep pockets …. It’s almost a snapshot of what the “left” has become today: a series of poses or positions, with no real backing, no strong agenda, and—militancy aside—basically hoping to broker a few deals with the mainstream Democrats.

That is an astute assessment. And it was, or could have been, clear enough in 1984. As I argued then,1 Jackson’s “insurgent” but obviously doomed campaign that year and again in 1988 came in the one period since 1948 when there was space for the candidate selection process to become a serious contest over whether the Democratic party would try to revive some version of a New Deal/social-democratic foundation or opt for Reaganism lite. Jackson’s quests substituted moralizing spectacle for that sort of debate.

I was by no means alone in receiving Jackson’s initial campaign with a combination of bemusement and skepticism. People who had been enmeshed in radical black politics frequently were skeptical because of familiarity with Jackson. Recently, a clip has circulated on the internet of former SCLC operative Hosea Williams describing Jackson’s astonishingly, and revealingly, self-promoting antics in the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Others who were in the group at the Lorraine Motel told versions of that same story. Many of us had heard it more than once and had had our own disappointing-to-enraging experiences with Jackson’s opportunism and self-aggrandizement dressed up as politics long before god told him to seek the Democratic presidential nomination. In fact, for some of us baby-boomer black leftists, white liberals’ and leftists’ discovery/invention of the Jesse Jackson phenomenon brought to mind the moment in the mid-sixties when Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding crossed over to the mainstream popular music market and encounters with white peers’ exuberant declarations of their discovery of what we had long known. (I still recall the electrifying sensation of first hearing Aretha’s version of “Today I Sing the Blues” on one of my local R&B radio stations as a thirteen-year-old in 1960.) Some of us were maybe even put off by white liberal-left types’ presumptions that Jackson’s political career began when they began paying attention and their inclinations to dismiss skepticism based on experience because it didn’t comport with the narrative they wanted to be true. That’s one way Jackson was indeed a warm-up act for Barack Obama.

In that environment, a dozen or so black academics and activists, all with roots in Black Power and post-Black Power radical debate and associated political struggles, met over several days at Hampshire College and Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts in 1984 to try to make sense of what Jackson’s initiative said about tendencies in black politics and the left in the context of triumphant Reaganism. We proceeded from the view that the black political establishment was bereft of ideas or strategy, as exemplified—in keeping with Marx’s introduction to the Eighteenth Brumaire—by their having staged a march in Washington on August 28, 1983, a little more than two months before Jackson’s announcement, to commemorate the fact that they’d held one there twenty years earlier.

And Jackson was implicated in articulating that bankrupt establishment politics. I lectured in one of my first courses as a member of the Howard University political science faculty, just after the 1976 election, on Jesse’s construction of the notion of a “black agenda” that was principally about which and how many prestigious black appointments Carter planned to make, and that’s what led to all the bullshit about how the “black vote” held the Democrats’ electoral balance of power and that “black interests”—as defined by Jackson—needed to be recognized accordingly. In the mid-1980s, political scientist Earl Picard, one of those post-Black Power radicals, advanced a sharp, concretely grounded critique of what he described as Jackson’s “corporate intervention strategy,”2 pioneered over the 1970s largely through Operation PUSH, as a class-skewed and politically demobilizing brokerage politics. That is, at Jackson’s crossover moment ample evidence was available that, notwithstanding performative shoutouts to left stances and causes, his fundamental approach to politics was personalistic and transactional. Attending to that history might have suggested caution in anointing him the left’s Great Hope, the human Spark that would galvanize a powerful mass movement. However, this is where analogy to the mid-sixties R&B crossover moment fails. It’s not just that left-Jackson enthusiasts (unlike Aretha fans) wanted the Magical Negro; it’s that (unlike Aretha herself) Jackson was always selling them the Magical Negro—his crossover moment was when he finally connected up with the audience he’d always been built for. He only really became who he was when he crossed over.

Several friends and comrades in the labor movement have demurred in response to criticism of Jackson’s politics, noting occasions when he showed up, as not many public figures would, to demonstrate support in union fights in which they were involved and stressing how important his presence was for focusing public attention on the injustices that provoked the strike and sustaining workers’ morale in soldiering through the fight. That point is well taken; such expressions of support can be especially meaningful in struggles against powerful interests. Those unionists’ appreciation for Jackson’s interventions also speaks to the admirable loyalty to allies that partly defines trade-union politics. No doubt Jackson’s support was heartfelt. It was also part of the Rainbow/PUSH business model. I knew at least two principal officers of large, prominent union locals in Chicago in the 1990s who had Jackson on retainer to make a designated number of appearances at union events annually.

At the same time, a hallmark of a serious left—one anchored to a vision of egalitarian social transformation and commitment to a long-term practice guided by struggle to realize that vision3—would be engaging in systematic consideration of possible longer- and shorter-term consequences of alternative courses of action and crafting political stances and alliances accordingly. In 2008, I argued that, rather than tailing behind liberals’ cultish enthusiasm about Obama, a left worthy of the descriptor would weigh just such calculations and would take seriously the red flags and contradictions around Obama and his campaign.4 E.g., could an imperialist Obama presidency stifle expression of opposition to the forever wars and with what effects? Could Obama’s disposition to identify progressive aspirations with his person undercut our abilities to organize and agitate for the practical utopias necessary for movement building—single-payer healthcare and other social wage expansions, for instance? (Recall how delicately Bernie Sanders had to tiptoe around criticizing the inadequate Affordable Care Act in both his campaigns lest he be accused of “disrespecting” Obama—a trope carried forward from Jackson’s campaigns—by attacking his signal creation.) No doubt the result still would have been to support Obama; not doing so, given the political context, was all but unthinkable. But perhaps engaging in more tough-minded strategic assessment would have encouraged supporting him in a way that didn’t succumb to the irrational exuberance and would’ve tried to anticipate the likelihood that the black Wall Street candidate would govern as an ordinary Democratic neoliberal. There may have been a way to support Obama that could have laid the groundwork for responding effectively to people like labor scholar and activist Leslie Lopez’s parents5 or the other seven to nine million Trump voters in 2016 who had voted for Sanders in the primaries and Obama at least once.6

Without having developed a concrete analysis and critique of Obamaite neoliberalism, including the neoliberal anti-racism around which nonwhite elites increasingly cohered, the nominal left had no material explanation for Trump’s rise and followed neoliberal Democrats of all colors in attributing it to reactionaries’ exploitation of atavistic racism, which led to association with psychologistic twaddle like assertions that whites initially voted for Obama to prove they weren’t racist, then had buyers’ remorse and swarmed to a vicious racist backlash. All variants of that kind of line point toward a politics centered on teaching white people to overcome their racism. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor put it several years ago—contrasting this view to her caricature of my supposedly “class reductionist” politics—“we want to win white people to an understanding of how their racism has fundamentally distorted the lives of Black people.”7 That is no politics, certainly not a politics rooted in broadening solidarities around common interests. It’s more like an idea you run by your Ford Foundation grant officer or Ivy League department chair.

Upon Jackson’s death, the ease and comfort with which left media leapt into the mind-numbing din of award-show accolades cataloguing his “Firsts,” what he supposedly overcame/anticipated/enabled/prepared the way for, or bequeathed to us struck me as one of the most revealing, and deflating, tells of the second Trump presidency. After all, when might we have had a neater hook, a more organic occasion to reflect before a broad audience on how liberal-left and Democratic politics evolved in and since the Reagan era, before neoliberalism had earned the name, in ways that have led us to the threshold of—perhaps only a subtle bourgeois palace coup away from?—fascism, if not from Trump’s Götterdämmerung? What might our side have done, or not done,8 that provided space and fuel for those reactionary forces? Might sober re-examination of decades of practice and rhetoric, with the benefit of seeing clearly how the balance of class power has played out, help us craft the vital and tedious work necessary to get us out of this most perilous situation of all our lifetimes? Instead, seeing the dilettantish reflex brought home just how far away we are from being able to gather and develop the political forces we need for there to be any hope to turn back the reactionary tide and still its siren song. I immediately recalled that a very close, longtime comrade, who had tended to urge greater patience in engaging with what I’ve sometimes derided as the Brooklyn coffeehouse left, declared frustratedly only a few weeks ago that too many in that orbit aspire to be influencers, not organizers.

Therefore, my objective here is not to comment on Jackson’s career, life, character, foibles, accomplishments, failings, or “place in history.” I have no interest in speculating on Jackson’s “legacy,” an always dubious (there’s only one way, by definition, to know what one’s legacy is, isn’t there?) notion now completely debased by LeBron James. I want to take advantage of the opportunity Jackson’s passage from the historical stage occasions to reflect on the political moment when his campaigns entered the Democratic party scene and how things have changed since then. The critique here is not at all about Jackson but of what we call this blob that operates in the cultural space in the U.S. that a left would.

Fatuities like John Ganz’s proclamation “In style, there’s no Barack Obama presidential run without Jackson, nor, in substance, Bernie Sanders’s primary campaigns,”9 while perhaps seeming to do the opposite, rest on a view that seems not to recognize that politics occurs within history, that alliances and cleavages emerge and evolve in relation to one another, and, specifically, does not consider deep tensions and contradictions in the earlier moment and how they may have contributed to opening the door for Trumpism. Peter Dreier, writing in Jacobin, begins his reflection boldly: “As a movement builder, spokesperson, and candidate for the presidency, Jesse Jackson’s accomplishments were massive. He was one of the towering figures of American progressive politics of his era—or any era.”10 Compare that assessment with this sober observation by Mary Summers, chief speechwriter for Jackson’s 1984 campaign, in a review of four books on that campaign (including mine):

At his best [Jackson] is able to speak to the aspirations of a great number of constituencies. In doing so as a presidential candidate, he often seems to be on the verge of vastly expanding the terms and scope of the political debate. Yet when push comes to shove, he consistently uses the tremendous excitement that he mobilizes simply to promote his own position as a negotiator, as a broker with the powers that be. It does not seem to occur to him that he could be leading a serious and sustained challenge to the status quo.11

Not only does this contrast affirm a long-held suspicion that Dreier wouldn’t know a dynamic social movement (see footnote 3) if it bit him in his nether parts, he follows that useless puffery with a discussion of Jackson’s presence among King’s key associates at the Lorraine Motel on the night before the assassination. His point is to establish Jackson’s closeness to King. Remarkably, despite mentioning Hosea Williams specifically, Dreier makes no reference to the bloodied shirt incident. This is not so much cherry-picking history as lobotomizing it.

David Duhalde, also writing in Jacobin, gives us: “With his two unabashedly left-populist campaigns for president in 1984 and 1988, Jesse Jackson opened the door to Bernie Sanders’s presidential runs—and a reborn American socialist movement.”12 Curiously, Duhalde discusses DSA of 1984 and 1988 as though they’re continuous with post-2016 DSA, yet another illustration that, whatever this left is, it coheres around the dilettante’s inability to think processually about the relation between past and present. And, like all the others who believe the moment calls for drafting proclamations for Jackson’s posthumous lifetime achievement awards rather than taking stock of our incredibly dangerous political conjuncture, Duhalde repeats the weakest version of the post hoc, propter hoc fallacy: Obama and Sanders (never mind that those two are as different as night and day) followed Jackson; therefore Jackson must have been responsible for them. None of those touting this claim offers a shred of anything remotely like evidence to support it. It’s all in the ether, in dilettante-speak.13 Duhalde also declares, “In times of a rising populist far right, Jackson’s legacy serves as a reminder to the left here and abroad that socialists and left populists should work together, to build a society where hope is not just kept alive, as Jackson was wont to say, but embedded into the fabric of its laws and practices.”

But why didn’t “Jackson’s legacy” help us preempt that rising reaction? What exactly would be its effect, then?

The Nation not unreasonably toots its own horn for how long the magazine supported Jackson. John Nichols quotes from its 1988 endorsement, “‘The Jackson campaign is not a single shot at high office,’ the editors wrote. ‘Rather it is a continuing, expanding, open-ended project to organize a movement for the political empowerment of all those who participate.’”14 Richard Kreitner also touts the magazine’s firm support for Jackson, and he concludes, “Jackson’s presidential campaigns represented the stirring of a dormant movement, the possibility of a class-inflected, multiracial coalition, one teased again in Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign before being unceremoniously cast aside. Still the energy of Jackson’s ‘embryonic campaign’ never entirely dissipated. It has resurfaced in intra-left debates over coalition politics, electoral strategy, Middle East policy, and the meaning of populism, debates that continue vigorously today (often in The Nation). Wherever the next progressive disruption comes from, it will have its roots in Jackson’s campaigns.”15

So, what happened to the grand promise that these rhetorical trophy inscriptions say Jackson opened for us? Why are the fascists in power? Is the recurring Jackson-inspired movement like Brigadoon—does it pop up now and again to give us hope and then disappear again into the mist?

Revisiting Mary Summers from 1987 can help us see some of the problem:

In addressing farmers in Iowa, or the American Public Health Association, he still speaks far more boldly to his audience’s aspirations for a better world than any other politician. When it comes to the key issues in public debate, however, he usually does not attempt to distinguish himself from his fellow candidates in ways that would clarify a progressive agenda. Jackson now joins the rest in attacking Germany and Japan for not paying “their fair share” of our military budget instead of stressing the criminal priorities of the Pentagon. Dukakis seems to be raising more sharply than Jackson the question of whether we should risk young men’s lives and World War III for Kuwaiti oil. Simon seems to be more willing to put himself on the line for a serious jobs program. In what is almost a caricature of a front runner, Jackson chooses to stress his record and his name recognition: “I’m the civil rights leader; I brought Lt. Goodman back home,” etc.16

That speaks to a fundamental limitation of Jackson’s initiative, the fact that he never intended to go where a left movement should. It is one thing to have been naïve in 1984 or even 1988 about the possibilities one believed Jackson to embody, though Summers makes clear that oceanic identification with him was even then not inevitable, even among his core supporters. But when misguided belief persists in the face of forty-two years of evidence to the contrary, of history moving in exactly the opposite direction, it’s not naivete any longer. It’s indicative of either a particularly egregious expression of lazy-mindedness or a prima facie admission of not taking politics seriously, of reducing it to bullshit performance—consistent with the aspiration to be an influencer, not an organizer.

Thus, once canonization of Jackson was on the agenda, the dilettantish leftists demonstrated how little they really know, care about, or try to understand politics. Jackson’s death seemed to stimulate a Pavlovian response among them to spew hyperbolic, pro forma blather, apparently without a moment’s thought that reflection on Jackson’s role in American politics could be an occasion for popular political education and for helping to address what Trumpism’s victory demonstrates emphatically: the utter and potentially catastrophic failure of what is generally recognized as left politics in the U.S.

In any event, to set the scene for Jackson’s entry to Democratic presidential politics, it was not clear in 1984 and 1988 how significant either election, or primary race, was likely to be in shaping the future of American politics and life. The general capitalist offensive against working-class gains in both wages and employment and social wage policies began in the 1970s, crested under Jimmy Carter’s presidency when he appointed Paul Volcker chair of the Federal Reserve, who then used the discipline of tight money to drive the economy into steep recession, in the process spiking unemployment, locking up real estate markets, reducing wages, and generally spreading misery and insecurity through the broad working class. Carter effectively engineered his own defeat by Ronald Reagan, who led a revanchist assault, both programmatic and ideological, on the Keynesian growth regime and what the anticommunist left considered a sacred postwar compact that encouraged capital to accept a mildly redistributive welfare state in exchange for class harmony. Significant elements within the capitalist class had determined that Keynesianism could not adequately address what was generally described as a crisis of profitability that, the Reaganites argued, could be resolved only by ruthlessly driving down working-class expectations. (Stephen Maher provides a very useful brief summary of that period.17) It’s worth recalling also that Reagan brought in from the crypto- and proto-fascist netherworld many of the vicious elements that now parade around openly in the Trump administration, which is one reason alarm bells should have gone off when, reading from the Obama playbook,18 a Democrat like Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) fulsomely praised Reagan in her official response to a Trump speech.

It’s important to note as well that the scope of the revanchist assault in either politics—in steep cuts to the social safety net or Reagan’s crushing of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981, which sent shock waves through organized labor—or in employers’ ongoing and escalating attacks on unions, particularly in the industrial sector, did not lead liberals and leftists to conclude that a new social order was under construction. Most critics on the left didn’t have much to offer beyond laments that corporate greed or some comparable sin was vitiating the postwar compact. Left intellectuals’ reactions to the attack characterized the problem in such terms as well. Interventions like Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison’s The Deindustrialization of America (Basic Books, 1984) and Sam Bowles et al., Beyond the Wasteland: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline (Anchor Books, 1983) identified new managerial styles and the crisis of profitability—which, despite their best efforts, felt a bit too close to employers’ complaints that workers were greedy—that undermined the mythical postwar order and set themselves the task of salvaging it by linking moral appeals to the Keynesian accumulation model’s benefits for the society as a whole and technical arguments as to how its efficiency could be restored. The full scope of what we were up against would not be clear for probably another decade. And reactionary ideology flooded all the routes that fed common sense, the “everyone knows that …” domain through which even liberals shape their basic views of the world. However, even though the real character of the assault wasn’t clear, there were efforts to oppose revanchist attacks mobilized in the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis, California’s Proposition 13 property tax initiative in 1978, bankers’ and corporations’ attacks on Cleveland’s Mayor Dennis Kucinich in 1979.19 In 1980 Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) led an ultimately unsuccessful left insurgency to deny the nomination to incumbent Carter, and environmentalist anti-corporate activist Barry Commoner led a third-party campaign under the label of the Citizens’ Party.

Carter was always a conservative Democrat. He was elected Georgia’s governor in 1970 as the candidate of segregationist nostalgia and first came to national visibility as a leader of the Stop McGovern movement at the 1972 convention in Miami. His close ally in that effort was fellow Georgian Ben Brown, a state legislator and political macher. Brown was a founder of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and, like Jackson, a veteran of the southern civil rights movement. After his election to the legislature, Brown was an organizer and chairman of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus and president of the Georgia Association of Black Officials. In 1976, he was deputy director of Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign and was later deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Carter was aligned with elements seeking to shift the Democratic party’s policy orientation rightward, at least with respect to public spending, and in his pursuit of the nomination he relied on support from black Democratic elites, especially those linked to the southern civil rights establishment, to allay northern liberals’ concerns about him. Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Sr., and others traveled across the country to reassure northern liberal Democrats that the Georgia Governor had their support and therefore must be all right.

In retrospect, not enough has been made of that development’s significance. On one level, it was straightforward. The black civil rights establishment was largely based in Atlanta, and Carter was like a favorite son candidate. Nearly all the prominent local black political elite, except Mayor Maynard H. Jackson and State Sen. Julian Bond, the only committed leftist among them, were early Carter supporters. On another level, the Carter campaign was an important moment in catalyzing institutionalization of the post-1965 black political class within key decision-making circles of the national Democratic party. That was also the basis for consolidation of what has been generally understood ever since as “black politics,” which political scientist Cedric Johnson describes as a “black ethnic politics, that mode of ethnic representational and electoral practices that was expanded and institutionalized nationally through the confluence of civil rights reform and Black Power mobilizations.”20 Johnson distinguishes this historically specific set of political arrangements from “black political life, the heterogeneous, complex totality of shifting positions, competing interests, contradictory actions and behaviors that constitute black political engagement historically.”

An anecdote may give a flavor of the sea change that campaign and election occasioned. As Carter secured the nomination, competition intensified between his network of key black political class supporters based in Atlanta and those in Washington, DC. During a break in a summer basketball game among students and faculty in my graduate department, our department chair quipped that he hoped Carter would win because he wanted to see all the Atlanta and DC black political operatives go to Washington to fight over that one black job. We all shared a laugh of familiarity. However, because history is made and does not simply unfold, we could not have known that Carter’s election would cross a threshold that rendered the joke obsolete. In 1976, important Democratic cities like Newark, Cleveland, Atlanta, Gary, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC had had black mayors. Blacks served in Congress from most important Democratic states, and more than 3,500 black people held elective office nationally at all levels. The 1976 election completed the black political class’s transition to full Democratic insider status. Blacks could never again be assumed accurately to be only cue-takers, though the claim persists as an exculpatory dodge. There would never again be only one job, not even figuratively.

That transition had ramifications extending well beyond black politics. The southern civil rights establishment’s pitch for Carter helped to shift the center of gravity of what constituted Democratic liberalism. The civil rights icons urged supporting Carter as a new sort of white southern racial progressive, and the hype around the supposed novelty of that identity, particularly with assistance from the corporate news and propaganda apparatus, effectively drowned out skepticism regarding his fiscal and economic conservativism. As the black civil rights leaders sang his praises, Carter was in the forefront of snuffing out one of the last legislative embers of the party’s social-democratic tendency, the Humphrey-Hawkins Act that would have mandated federal commitment to real full employment.21 Carter eventually signed a version of the bill but only after making clear from the outset that he opposed it in principle and would sign it only if it were rendered toothless. “Black politics,” that is, was institutionalized as part of the decidedly anti-social-democratic tendency that contested for dominance within the Democratic party and would become the faux left, moralistic vanguard of Democratic neoliberalism once Clintonites purified the party in the 1990s to establish Wall Street’s priorities with veto power over all others.

The “black ethnic politics” Johnson describes was, and remains, a brokerage politics, and brokerage politics as a default concedes large questions of political direction in favor of maintaining a claim to deliver what can be defined as benefits within whatever policy regime, if only as “the best we can do.” (That is one reason the black political class was initially flummoxed to learn that Reagan seemed to have no interest in establishing a brokerage relation with them.) That was the context in which, after Carter’s election, Jesse Jackson put himself forward to present the president-elect with a black political agenda that focused primarily on appointments.

Jackson’s proposed agenda rested on a sleight-of-hand that substitutes representation for redistribution: e.g., appointment of black judges and cabinet officials stands in for social wage policies, restoring progressivity to the federal tax code, labor and environmental protection, occupational safety and health, and the like. That sleight-of-hand could work smoothly because racial brokerage ideology became hegemonic as the black political stratum became solidly established as a class for itself, and the remnants of popular politics among black people dissipated.

From its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, racial brokerage politics has hinged on sleight-of-hand; it has always been a class politics dressed up as a race politics.22 As Judith Stein argued in the mid-1970s,23 racial brokerage politics was also from its origins an explicit alternative to a popular politics; she noted that Booker T. Washington’s origination of that role on the national stage was a direct response to capitalists’ anxieties concerning black involvement in the Populist insurgency.24 Racial brokerage politics also has always proceeded from Victorian racialist premises about black people. Whether or not camouflaged with mystical formalisms like linked fate and “black utility heuristic,”25 brokerage ideology presumes that black people share a hive mind and that “leaders”—however designated—effectively represent the interests and concerns of the racial totality. And that sets up another sleight-of-hand: because the leader embodies the aspirations of the entire race, “disrespecting” the leader affronts the race by proxy, and the political agenda the leader sets, as regarding Jackson and, with additional layers of sleight-of-hand, Obama, or any tinhorn elected official or public figure, can reduce to a demand for proper displays of respect to the leader and through them to black people. As a politics, this is the equivalent of planting one’s pivot foot and turning 360 degrees.

Bayard Rustin argued, writing at a crucial crossroads after passage of the landmark civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, that the movement for social and racial justice needed to take a new, more broadly social-democratic direction.26 The following year, in a critique of the Black Power alternative to his proposal, Rustin observed of black power advocates that “what they are in fact arguing for (perhaps unconsciously) is the creation of a new black establishment.”27 A decade later, Rustin’s observation was well on the way to realization. The new black establishment was consolidating its position within the highest reaches of a rightward-moving Democratic party, in part via defining black Americans’ political concerns in exclusively race-reductionist terms and asserting custodianship over a ventriloquized “black vote.” Jackson’s first campaign assisted that project by declaring him voice of a unitary black electorate.

Jackson’s initial run may have reflected or stoked a tension between elected officials and the civil rights establishment for pride of place as bearers of “black interests” in Democratic party circles. By the 1984 Convention and definitely by the 1988 campaign, such tensions as may have existed had been resolved. By the second campaign, Jackson was the black political class’s consensual candidate and spearhead of its jockeying for place in the party hierarchy. The latter involved, it would turn out, crafting and refining the role race, and the black political class, would play in constituting post-Carter/post-Reagan Democratic liberalism.

None of the leftist commentary on or appreciations of Jesse Jackson’s two campaigns or his broader role in American politics, at the time or since, has touched on or seemed informed by, or even aware of, any of the intricacies and relations laid out in the eleven previous paragraphs. And that’s not even the worst of it.

By 1984 it was clear to labor and left interests that the party needed some clear counter to Reaganism. To be sure, there wasn’t necessarily a standard-bearer for the labor-left tendency in 1984 whose efforts Jackson’s entry preempted; George McGovern was generally seen as superannuated and was a serious candidate only in his own mind. Perhaps Mondale could have been pushed to be more coherent and assertive as bearer of liberal-labor-left interests, but perhaps not. After more than three decades of sanitizing capitalism’s class contradictions, what remained of the old New Deal left was like a deer in the headlights of the relentless attacks, especially without a sharp critique of capitalist class power to guide them. Jackson’s campaign was partly, therefore, not unlike a placeholder. A left without clear critique or strategic vision could sustain itself on enthusiasm while hoping that something more concrete and institutional would emerge magically from the motion. This tendency, which I’ve described as “the Myth of the Spark,”28 would recur in relation to the anti-WTO mobilizations, Occupy, #BlackLivesMatter, and the Summer of George Floyd, all “movements” with no objectives or real base.

After Mondale’s rout by Reagan, the party’s pro-business conservative wing organized itself into the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and went to work in attempting to move the party’s policy orientation to the right on both economic and social issues, including a tough-on-crime agenda and draconian welfare reform. As Summers points out, Jackson displayed no particular interest in building politically between presidential election years on the electoral enthusiasm his campaign generated.

In 1988 Paul Simon and, to a more limited extent, Richard Gephardt, who after all was a founding member of the DLC, ran on working-class inflected agendas but never got off the ground. Ironically, the Super Tuesday format, which bunched southern primaries early with intent to give a boost to a conservative, most likely Al Gore, backfired when Jackson ran. Proto-DLC types had engineered that format thinking of southern Democrats as more conservative—overlooking that southern parties and Democratic electorates were the blackest and therefore likely more open than most to redistributive programs. If the rest of the field had had to compete for black southern Democrats’ votes, Simon may have come out of Super Tuesday in a stronger position and gotten more early traction, or perhaps the competition could have produced a better version of Dukakis. As it stood, everyone knew Jackson didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the nomination, but no one would say so out loud partly because the Jackson forces, especially with all the folderol about hope, were primed to denounce doing so as racist. So, the other candidates didn’t even bother to campaign at all for black voters—who may well have been pro- or antiwar voters, pro- or anti-environmentalist voters, pro- or anti-tough on crime voters, corporate regulation and/or social wage voters, pro- or anti- reproductive freedom voters—accepting that Jesse would get all the black votes, and the party would bargain with him. Jesse, as I argued then, effectively removed black voters and the need to appeal to them directly on the basis of their material interests from the debate over charting the party’s ideological and programmatic direction post-Reagan.

Between 1988 and 1992, the Wall Street-oriented Democrats became dominant in the party; Bill Clinton won the 1992 nomination and the presidency. Jackson indicated that he would not contest in the primaries that year and instead adopted a kingmaker’s posture, expecting to be courted. During the primaries he played the candidates off against one another, once chiding Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), who bid to be the labor-left candidate, that Clinton, whom Jesse eventually endorsed as the clear frontrunner, called Jackson daily. Interestingly, Mary Summers predicted at the outset of the campaign, when Harkin was desperately pursuing his endorsement, that Jackson would dither and tease until eventually endorsing the prohibitive frontrunner.

It is well known that Clinton’s presidency consolidated neoliberalism in the U.S. much as Tony Blair would do in the UK. Less widely noted than the Clintonite New Democrats committing the Democratic party to Wall Street and bipartisan neoliberalism is that the black political class accommodated, participated in, and defended that right-wing turn and was itself shaped through it. Clinton’s early use of racial dog-whistles, e.g., in the Sistah Souljah incident, First Lady Hillary Clinton’s propagation of scurrilous “super predator” mythology, and the administration’s efforts to have it both ways with “mend it, don’t end it” rhetoric on affirmative action all amounted to something of a tightrope act. They were gestures intended to communicate the New Democrats’ willingness to scold black people and combat racial excesses, and predictably, all drew black criticism. Yet, Clintonites nonetheless wanted, and needed, to be the party of racial justice. The Clinton presidency not only completed neoliberalism’s hegemonic seal and established its precepts, principally the primacy of the market, as the outer boundary of the thinkable in both ideology and policy directions; it was also the context within which “black politics” improvised, evolved, and was consolidated in Democratic leadership circles as concrete practice and networks of elite social relations.

Opinion-shaping black elites’ embrace of underclass ideology during the 1980s and 1990s provided them a niche in the emerging neoliberal order in packaging punitive approaches to social policy as their special responsibility for racial rehabilitation and uplift, later recast as programmatic antiracism.29 It is also commonly overlooked that black political elites’ symbiotic allies in racial transition in urban politics in the 1960s and 1970s were mainly their redevelopment-oriented, proto-neoliberal, white political elite counterparts. Those alliances were held together by shared commitments to racial inclusion and market-driven redevelopment. Demobilization in black politics meshed with neoliberalism’s general logic of de-democratization.30 Moreover, race-reductionist leftists today who link mass incarceration rhetorically to the Jim Crow era and police forces to slave patrols overlook the fact that the Clinton administration’s many tough-on-crime initiatives had considerable support from black people. Two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the New Democrats’ 1994 Crime Bill, which was supported as well by a preponderance of local black officials and elite opinion-leaders.31

In much the same way as the Atlanta civil rights establishment sanitized Carter by lauding his embrace of racial justice to dismiss his opposition to social democracy, focus on racial and other expressions of disparity overrode pursuit of equality in the neoliberalizing Democratic party in the 1990s and beyond, as Walter Benn Michaels and I argue in “The Trouble with Disparity.”32 The ur-text of disparity ideology was Melvin Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (Routledge, 1995). As subsequent developments would make clear, proliferation of the discourse of racial disparity was a class program, another sign of the black political class’s consolidation.33 (Merlin Chowkwanyun and I published a critical examination of disparity ideology in the 2012 issue of the Socialist Register.34) The increasingly common lament, “But blacks (or women, etc.) have it worse,” performed another sleight-of-hand: maintaining racial (or gender, etc.) parity in the distribution of inequality in a society that becomes steadily more unequal overall means that greater and greater absolute numbers of racial minorities, women, etc. will fall toward the bottom, even as members of those groups hold their appropriate proportions of those at the top. Projecting black political interests as frozen from before 1965 facilitates perceiving race-reductionist politics as militant or radical, in the aggressive imagery of Black Power, even though trading equality for equity as group parity in the distribution of market-driven inequality is a quintessentially neoliberal ideal of justice.

To that extent, we might consider another gloss on the 1983 commemoration of the March on Washington, particularly in light of the more recent proliferation of the bizarre view that “nothing has changed” for black Americans since 1965, 1865, or even 1619.35 To underscore my colleague’s astute reflection on Jackson and prolepsis, historian Michael Rudolph West, in discussing Booker T. Washington’s rise to prominence and his origination of the notion of “race relations,”36 describes the notion’s impact on black Americans’ civic participation at the end of the nineteenth century in almost exactly the terms in which I describe the effect of “the black vote” here.37

As we see over and over in films and elsewhere,38 images drawn from the high period of civil rights activism, Black Power demonstrations, urban uprisings, reconstructions of slave rebellions, or random reproductions of slavery or other depictions of racial oppression carry no specific conceptual meaning whatsoever. They certainly articulate no political agenda or program. They convey a sensation of familiarity, and that sensation tacitly asserts that race/racism defines and limits black people’s circumstances today in the same ways and to the same extent as it did before the victories of the mid-1960s and, therefore, that the African American condition today requires a race-reductionist politics no less than then. The realities of black intra-racial political-economic differentiation become steadily greater and more difficult to deny,39 and race-reductionists’ efforts to compress past and present require positing ever more blatant and outrageous falsehoods of the sort that can emerge only from a university or an asylum—Afropessimism and the idea that the world is driven by universal, ontological hatred of blackness; Afrofuturism, which advances prolepsis as social theory;40 “Thirteentherism,” the fairy tale that the Amendment that abolished slavery contained a poison pill that permitted reimposing it;41 tortured “just like Jim Crow” stories that deny history; demands for racial reparations that present a dubious tort claim as somehow a challenge to capitalism; assertion that a supposed “racial” wealth gap (i.e., that rich black people are not as rich as rich white people) is the principal source of inequality today—to sustain, or call for others to maintain, commitment to a race-reductionist politics and interpretation.

The narrowness of this politics can be truly breath-taking. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) recently threatened retribution against Illinois Governor JB Pritzker for endorsing his Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton in the Illinois Democratic Senate primary, rather than the CBC’s candidate, Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL).42 Both candidates are black women. However, the CBC insisted that Pritzker, an attractive possible Democratic presidential candidate for 2028, had an obligation to back its preferred black candidate. In the current political climate, the CBC’s demand is not simply tone-deaf. It is yet another illustration of the programmatic bankruptcy of brokerage politics. In the face of peril, validating the brokerage relation is of greater importance than fighting off fascism.

By 2016,43 in the face of the nearly complete and intense mobilization of the black political and opinion-shaping/influencer stratum against Sen. Bernie Sanders, including vicious attacks by former civil rights movement icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus who denounced him as irresponsible for demanding public goods, it should have been clear to any leftist paying attention that race-reductionist antiracism is an explicitly anti-left politics.

The burning question, fortuitously both prompted and answered in the pro forma responses of those left dilettantes to Jesse Jackson’s death, is why wasn’t it? The empty, pro forma way of talking about—not reflecting on—Jackson isn’t new. It’s common enough and betrays a deeply embedded presumption that the actions, thought, and behavior of black people are not really part of American politics, that black political life operates in a different register, one that is alien and ultimately unknowable to non-blacks. That premise is what it is; I could put a label on it, though doing so likely would unhelpfully minimize a more capacious phenomenon. It also supports another marker of the political dilettante—lazy mindedness, and a lazy-mindedness that can afflict otherwise serious and rigorous thinkers, especially when a moment of particular urgency seems to demand instant analysis (another temptation of the dilettante).44

So, when we seek explanations for Trumpist fascism’s rise to power, one element of the story has to be that a nominal left that blithely rehearses anti-solidaristic, race-reductionist bromides and is committed to electoralist immediatism or to being influencers rather than organizers, tailing behind liberals and identitarians for recognition and gratification is either incapable of or rejects the kind of slow-cooker organizing necessary to build a solidaristic political movement rooted on the broadly shared identity of having to work for a living and all the issues entailed by that fundamental condition. Certainly now, though I believe ever, a day in the life of the sort of left we need begins and ends with trying to connect with workers and deepen and expand a base in the broad working class. Trying to catch Ezra Klein’s attention for yet another, smarter round of “the Conversation” with more sophisticated poll data is the job description of Dilettante 2^nd Class.