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Jesse Jackson Reshaped the Democratic Party

The candidate may have started as a long-shot contender, but The Nation always took him—and his impact on political history—seriously.

In the spring of 1983, as the Democratic Party searched for a path out of the Reaganite darkness, Jesse Jackson was a long-shot contender for the party’s presidential nomination—at least in the eyes of much of the political class. But in June of that year, The Nation treated his “embryonic campaign” as more than a far-fetched curiosity. Jackson’s bid for the nomination, the editors wrote, had already come to “symbolize a new dimension of black electoral power,” one that “threatens to reshape the Democratic Party as it stumbles toward the end of the century.”

From the start, the magazine treated Jackson’s campaign as a development with significant implications for the future of the party and the country. It stood to have a “disruptive effect” on the Democratic status quo. After years of unconvincing and morally indefensible feints to the right, it was about time: For decades, liberals had relied on Black voters and other minorities as a dependable base—“safe and stable,” in The Nation’s phrasing—then relegating them to the margins once campaigns were won. In what Jackson called the emerging Rainbow Coalition, by contrast, the candidate sketched the outlines of something more ambitious and durable—a coalition of “the poor of all races, the unemployed, women, Hispanics,” millions of Americans “floating around the edges of the mainstream.”

The excitement was real, but there were tensions within the Rainbow Coalition, and writers in The Nation’s pages debated them at length. In early 1984, after Jewish organizations accused Jackson of bigotry—charges tied both to offensive rhetorical missteps (calling New York “Hymietown”) and, perhaps more to the point, to his support for Palestinian rights—Philip Green mounted a defense of Jackson, arguing that some of the allegations blurred the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. He noted that Jackson had apologized for his remarks. “One apology per error is exactly as many as........

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