Jesse Jackson: The Great Man's Populism
Tucker, William
Union, and that there is nothing wrong with any adversary of ours that cultural exchange would not cure. When it comes to the Third World, however, the conscience finds its true voice and...
...And she handed me a pile of McGovern leaflets ostentatiously filled with black faces...
...This is why organized labor still forms the backbone of the Democratic party...
...But "cheap labor" simply means blacks...
...In exchange for being cut out of the competitive picture, blacks were given the welfare system...
...is wedded to the Democratic party haven't been paying much attention...
...I learned a bit about what black people are really like, in their homes, their churches, and their neighborhoods...
...Not only are we tourists down here, but we're a tourist attraction...
...What is going to happen when the Democrats get to San Francisco...
...According to Jesse Jackson, apartheid is worse than Hitler...
...Whatever happens, one of these three main factions is going to come out of San Francisco feeling they have been cheated and "read out of the party...
...a conscience must offer fixed points of reference, and evil serves as well as good...
...I can't really claim any more participation in the civil rights effort than that...
...If anything, they are the polar opposites of much of the cultural liberalism that has found its home in the Democratic party over the last decade...
...I was reminded of this again recently when my wife and I bought a cooperative apartment in what is usually called a "changing neighborhood...
...Such lack of understanding isn't likely to carry far in bringing blacks and unions together...
...What shall we say of Jackson's fellow Democratic candidates, who have gone some distance in condoning him...
...The only people who are going to lose are those liberals who have believed for so long that by mumbling a few phrases about welfare and affirmative action they could quietly walk away every year with nearly 10 percent of the electorate...
...All Jackson's talk about a "rainbow coalition" has failed to materialize, but at least half the black vote is now solidly in his camp...
...They are perfectly correct...
...To know the face of absolute evil it suffices to have lived through the time of the Atlanta murders, which proved that it was "open season on the blacks...
...In fact...
...The people who were cut out by the regulatory protections of the New Deal were the unlicensed, unauthorized, and unorganized blacks...
...It is just the opposite...
...9 Labor Unions: Let's start at the beginning, at the moment the contemporary Democratic party was born in 1932...
...Through the proper use of money and a positive attitude, we can stimulate self-development and give the people a vision...
...Yet Jackson, to repeat, faced a genuine problem...
...It is perfectly sufficient to hold up to the imagination a model of Evil, also known as South Africa...
...It struck me as a peculiarly arrogant and insensitive gesture...
...A t this point, the reeling of the mind may reach a dangerous level, as it becomes ever more clear that the new conscience turns out to be more than a bit of a racist, one that has the effrontery forever to be charging others with racism...
...This seems even more likely if the Democrats fail to nominate a woman for Vice President...
...What is truly surprising is that liberals seem incapable of recognizing what is going on...
...The results in the primaries so far have at times seemed almost embarrassing...
...I said I thought somebody should go up and register people in the black community--which was obviously being ignored...
...What they never seem to realize is that, while black people do commit about 60 percent of the nation's violent crimes, they are also the victims of 60 percent of these crimes...
...Here we are in Vacationland, U.S.A.," another black piped up one morning as we sat around on the steps of the "Freedom House" in Holly Springs...
...It is the emergence of blacks from under liberal domination...
...When I mention these things, they usually draw William Tucker is a contributing editor o f Harper's...
...When you look at the difference in crime rates between black and white neighborhoods, it's easy to see what he means...
...This is basically true...
...So we have something in common...
...The Jews never sought to be the index of the West's morality...
...blacks have a major bone of contention with almost every one of the stalwart party groups ~hat now play such a strong role in choosing the nominee...
...There is no need to point to any country of the Third World as a Utopia, an embodiment of the Good...
...Women's groups, for example, have sensed his underlying doubts about abortion (although he does support "freedom of choice...
...Yet obviously something else is going on here...
...We must restore our moral imperatives...
...Jesse Jackson isn't about to rip the standard out of the hands of Walter Mondale and his old New Dealers, or Gary Hart and his old "new ideaers...
...As for my own disillusionment with liberalism, I think I date it from the day in 1972 when I walked down to McGovern headquarters in my small Hudson River village and asked to help...
...All our fellow co-op owners are card-carrying liberals, ready to rush at a moment's notice to the defense of welfare, school busing, and affirmative action...
...What can their excuse be, in this case, for their failure of conscience...
...There was a pervasive fear--three of our young compatriots had already been killed--but there was also the heady sense that we were playing a part in history...
...The Democratic party has not repudiated Jesse Jackson, far from it...
...The new conscience had to contest the old one, although, and because, it struck many as being in reasonably good shape...
...The seven other Democratic candidates in the race at the'time of the "Hymie" incident scarcely even criticized him...
...These are just ordinary, hard-working black people who hold down jobs, go to church, and even own their own homes...
...The liberal attitude is going to be that blacks are "biting the hand that feeds them" and that they are being "ungrateful...
...You were only dabbling in it, and could go back to the white middle class any time you liked...
...No matter...
...Thus one is able to comprehend Jesse Jackson's predicament...
...As much as Hart's battalions of liberals and Yuppies and Mondale's legions of elderly, bluecollars, and Jews may antagonize each other, they will probably all agree that "selling out" to Jesse is the worst thing either of them could do...
...I'm going to keep working on you until I get a smile and a good conversation," said one local black girl to me as I tried to get over the shyness of the first few days...
...You'll probably want to take some of these...
...The Reverend Jackson was talking about the North Vietnamese after they marched into Saigon...
...The questions that have been the time...
...They rarely miss the opportunity to bait him on it...
...Then, sometime around the middle of July, he will deferentially step aside and let the plum of 10 million black votes drop effortlessly into the lap of the Democratic standard bearer...
...It is the last, of course-Jackson's continuing friendly relations with the Arabs--that has led to the series of emotionally charged confrontations with Jewish groups...
...Now blacks are going to become a third constituency that will be even harder to bring under the ever more unwieldy umbrella of the Democratic coalition...
...Jackson-the-conscience has expanded on the slogan that black is beautiful to offer the profound teaching that black, and only black, is also true and good...
...Jackson is a contemporary William Jennings Bryan, long on oratory, short on detailed foresight, but deeply rooted in the traditions and aspirations of the long-suffering group he represents...
...I looked around the neighborhood and said: "What are you worried about...
...In the mid-seventies, Jackson was involved in an effort to get black candidates to run on the Republican line in the South in order to circumvent entrenched white Southern Democrats and revive the two-party system...
...Like the Shadow, the conscience knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men...
...I was in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, and he joined the Selma march in 1965, and went on to become Martin Luther King's trusted aide...
...Domestically, blacks have known the absolute oppression, having fought segregation in the South...
...My guess is that Jackson is going to be the loser...
...When Democrats complained after Jackson accepted an invitation in 1978 to serve as the keynote speaker at a meeting of the Republican National Committee, he replied: "Some Democrats who feel that blacks are their personal political property became offended because one of their slaves jumped the f e n c e . . . The Democratic party will get our votes only if they deserve them...
...But this has been somewhat tailored to the Democratic primaries...
...In truth, Jackson is very much like Jimmy Carter (whom he admires...
...But basically, black people are very patriotic and conservative...
...Or he could just tell black people to sit on their hands in November...
...Jackson, as befits a working conscience, is big on litmuspaper tests...
...It is almost as if blacks had suddenly emerged as a different country within the confines of the United States...
...This isn't likely to sit well with ten million black voters who call themselves Democrats...
...themselves up in a huff and say something like: "Jesse Jackson and every other black person in this count r y entered the civil-rights movement the day they were born...
...Critic Alfred Kazin, in writing recently about his recollections of race relations in Brooklyn in the 1920s, said that the only thing he could really remember about blacks was that "they were always the people who bid low" on home-improvement contracts...
...What will happen if blacks raise questions about the welfare system and its inevitable destruction of the black family--as the NAACP and the Urban League have already started doing...
...Yet strangely, they are all terrified of blacks...
...That experience has much more to do with suffering than with acting, according to Jackson...
...Jackson has taken a "Third World" perspective, advocating a hands-off approach to liberation movements and denouncing "repression" in Central America, South Africa, and the Middle East...
...When I see babies making babies, there's a crisis in values...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984...
...That is just one small reason why I think the Democrats are in for a big surprise this year...
...Jackson sees himself as a Moses leading his people toward the promised land, and in this case leaving Egypt may mean spurning the Democratic party...
...The experience of blacks becomes transfigured into the Black Experience, a paradigm...
...in this case it divined the existence of " a cultural conspiracy to kill black people whether physically, politically, economically, psychologically, or s p i r i t u a l l y . . . " When it comes to the world beyond these shores, the same principles obtain...
...It doesn't leave any room for the "helping professions"--social work, psychology, welfare bureaucracy--whose ranks educated liberals usually fill...
...The first thing they wanted to do was bar the windows, bolt the doors, and maybe even put sentries on the roof in order 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 to keep them at bay...
...They are not the people liberals think they are...
...The problem is that Western civilization already has such a test, the treatment afforded to Jews...
...The question is invariably going to arise, "Why not Jesse for Vice President...
...Liberals tend to be uneasy with this formulation, because it sounds too much like the good old-fashioned Horatio Alger approach...
...In general one can say that it is mostly non-white, and in particular one can say it is mostly black...
...On the Palestinians, Jackson argues that his position is no different from that of the minority Labor party in Israel...
...Neither party is worthy of blind loyalty and religious veneration...
...So far, liberals are the least happy...
...I won't argue this...
...Indeed, he was praised for his candor and courage...
...The Post speculated that Jackson's only grievance against organized labor must be that it was already supporting Walter Mondale...
...In this connection, it becomes especially important to be fair to Jesse Jackson, and fairness dictates that one understand his anti-Semitism as incidental, though by no means accidental...
...We started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which still plays an important role in the state's politics today...
...This is what every other "ethnic group in America has eventually done to ensure its political success...
...They are--with the exception of the Middle East--essentially the policies of the early Carter Administration...
...9 Cultural Liberalism: Quick, who said the following...
...That made the whole effort worthwhile...
...J e s s e Jackson and I entered the civil fights movement about the same time...
...Here is how it used Jackson as a vessel on April 18, 1976 according to the Chicago T r i b u n e : I believe we should look to the Third World for an answer...
...Most New Deal regulationswand all subsequent government supervisory efforts--have given established professionals and union laborers protection against "cheap" and "unlicensed" competitors...
...So far, though, I don't think I have managed to convince anyone...
...I suspect Jackson's primary campaign is merely a preliminary to the founding of a black party that will attempt to nqgotiate between the two parties to see which will give them a better deal...
...People who think Jackson...
...Jackson's attacks on the Democrats and the unions are surely the rational tactics for a candidate with little to lose...
...What will this mean for November...
...Crime: Somewhere back in the seventies, many liberals seem to have gotten the idea that letting black criminals out of jail would set off celebrations of joy in the streets of the black community...
...The truth is that Jews have probably been more solicitous of the cause of blacks than any other group in America, but the patronage has probably been based on a tacit understanding that blacks will return this support on the problems in the Middle East...
...Jackson argues that one of the principal form~ of racial discrimination in the country is "lack o f equal police protection...
...Since announcing his candidacy, Jackson has tended to emphasize the standard liberal argument that the Reagan Administration is "the friend of the rich and the enemy of the poor...
...The convention may begin with neither Mondale nor Hart in complete command, and Jackson in a position to broker a win for either of them...
...One terrifically bright local 15-year-old whom everybody at the Freedom House loved went on to become a black student leader at Brandeis, and was written about in a book called Don't Shoot: We Are Your Children...
...But it is indicative of the information gap that exists between the white "leadership" and the black "rank-and-file" of the liberal coalition...
...9 The Bureaucracy: Jackson is one of the few black leaders who has preached self-help and challenged the myth that only "white racism" stands between black people and economic success...
...In fact, it presages the general falling out all along the line that is likely to occur between blacks and their former liberal allies...
...The way to understand Jesse Jackson is to realize he is a black populist...
...It constitutes a response to a gen -~ uine problem...
...The problem for the Democrats every year since 1968 has been holding together its two mismatched constituencies--upper middle-class liberals and blue-collar working people...
...All this doesn't mean there's going to be a political explosion between blacks and ACLU lawyers over the crime issue...
...Those who have, say, participated in civil rights activities know how to deal with tyrants, who--in the view of conscience politics--do not differ all that much from recalcitrant Southerners...
...Nor is it necessary to have participated actively in the struggle for civil rights...
...Now that blacks have produced a true leader-and I think Jackson truly does represent the black community--the liberal coalition is going to find itself marching off in different directions...
...When I see young men measuring their manhood by their ability to make a baby with no commitment to raise the baby, there's a crisis in values...
...Why are you letting the "system" off the hook?' " Jackson said in an interview with Ebony a few years ago...
...It was the liberals--employing their "divide-andconquer" strategy--who kept insisting that black people were different, and that their political strategy had to be built around this continuing emphasis...
...Blacks have always been regarded as a passive participant, ready to go along with whatever agreement these two factions worked out...
...The message from there is clear...
...The new conscience understands the treatment afforded to blacks as a litmus-paper test of morality...
...He came to think of Zionism as a "noxious weed" because it was so bold as to assert rights that were far from first on his agenda...
...This is why Jesse Jackson is unpopular with liberals but may stir some appeal in the Middle American community...
...One crucial lesson remains to be learned, however...
...They got it anyway--the sophisticated Eastern politicos being shoved aside--and Bryan led them to three spectacular defeats...
...The n e w . . , l e a d e r s . . , have concentrated on rebuilding, putting people to work, inculcating new values and attitudes...
...The strongest ticket the Democrats could put forth, of course, would be Mondale and Hart, or Hart and Mondale...
...Thus the whole thrust of the convention may become how to keep Jackson off the ticket...
...Of course, I am only saying this to tweak my liberal friends...
...But what I did learn in those few summer months of 1964, and the brief intervals I spent afterwards working in black communities, is something that I don't think many liberals have ever discovered...
...It worked only as long as establishment liberals remained the leaders, and black people were the loyal followers...
...This was Jackson's stump New Hampshire speech as reported recently in the Village Voice...
...When people get married and don't have the will to stay together, there's a crisis in values...
...What is happening between Jews and Jackson is not likely to abate...
...He is trying to wed Southern economic populism with traditional rural values, while still seeming hip enough to appeal to Northern liberals...
...But it is certain that Mondale would not settle for second place again, and Hart seems too vain and isolated to do it either...
...The Democratic party of the late nineteenth century purported to represent outcast Midwestern farmers, but when Bryan arrived the Democrats weren't interested in his leadership...
...Instead, I think this is going to be the year that the Democratic coalition of the last 20 years comes apart at the seams...
...Jackson is certain--and will then claim--to be the true "minority" representative...
...We had been taught that blacks were at once shuffling servants and lascivious satyrs...
...The Jesse Jackson campaign, then, is not a liberal apotheosis...
...I n the end, though, these changes will be good for everybody...
...The current wisdom is that Jesse Jackson is going to go out registering millions of new voters and build enthusiasm for an anti-Reagan crusade...
...The people we met, instead, were real and complicated--our contemporaries...
...After all, even such an illustrious conservative populist as James Watt has called Jackson "one of my two favorite contemporary politicians" (along with President Reagan), and says that Jackson is "a bright, articulate leader who is obviously going to have appeal outside the black community...
...The leader of our project, Ivanhoe Donaldson, was deputy mayor of Washington for many years...
...I came back North to become a newspaper reporter...
...Oh, you want to go up there...
...After Jackson made headlines by commenting that "the United States is likely to have a black or a woman President before the AFL-CIO does," the Washington Post editorialized inasked of me the most are 'Why are you putting all of this pressure on the victim instead of the victimizer...
...When it comes to the Third World, however, the conscience finds its true voice and becomes lyrical...
...Those murders, to be sure, turned out to have been committed by a black, apprehended as the result of a concentrated manhun t conducted by a community concerned with the safety of its children, regardless of race, but never mind that...
...We both started college in 1960, and began participating in demonstrations shortly after...
...I met him again in New York recently...
...The role was thrust upon them by Crusaders, members of the Inquisition, and, most notoriously, by Nazis...
...They may want the government to help them, they may accept some of the rhetoric about big corporations being evil and Reagan being the "friend of the rich...
...A l l of us who went to Mississippi that summer of 1964, I think, shared the secret delight that we were discovering a whole spectrum of people whose perspective had been completely submerged in American history...
...At this point, all hell is going to break loose...
...Jackson has broken ranks so decisively here that he often comes under criticism from other black leaders...
...It should be noted, first, that Jackson's positions are not far out of the mainstream of the Democratic party...
...They did it with military authority and a liberated attitude...
...Black people are not soldiers in the liberal army...
...the new conscience is not only generally racist, but quite specifically anti-Semitic...
...It was, to be sure, constantly violated, but there was, at least, a genuine conscience to violate...
...But it does appeal to the average American, who feels deep down that it is his own personal effort that keeps him afloat...
...But the rifts Jackson is uncovering are deep, and getting harder to mend all dignantly: "Mr...
...He had just started working for E.F...
...Hutton, specializing in municipal bonds, and was looking very prosperous...
...What happens when blacks start challenging the job-monopolizing practices of labor unions...
...It has been fascinating for me to observe what has happened.., in the past year...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 23 _9 Foreign Affairs: This is where the political explosions could occur...
...And why not...
...I don't think it is going to happen that way...
...It is often said that the New Deal "saved capitalism by rescuing the middle class...
...It is drawn straight from the heart of his Baptist ministry and will probably be the bread and butter of his campaign to Middle America...
...said a stuffy McGovern worker...
...Jackson has emerged as a black leader who does not feel beholden to these agreements, and the recriminations have been rancorous...
...He became "sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust" because the Holocaust was cramping his style...
...Jackson'sremarks about Jews have surely given pause to any number of decent Democrats, but the response to those remarks should give pause to us all...
...They paid dearly for the dubious privilege of being an indicator of decency--or rather, indecencymat any given time...
...It is not surprising, then, that Jackson has aimed some of his earliest and sharpest barbs against labor unions, and the exclusionary practices that have long kept blacks from competing in the job market...
...At the end of the summer, one small boy told me he had always thought he hated white people, but now he had decided he changed his mind...
...Jackson could feel wronged enough to put a "Rainbow Party" on the ballot and be a spoiler...
...I guess the system worked for him after all...
...In any case, it is certain that the young black voters who turned out in such remarkable numbers for Jackson in the primaries will not go to the polls with the same enthusiasm for Hart or Mondale in November...
...The Rev...
...At bottom, liberals have never understood what black people are about...
...I doubt if there will be any resolution of these differences...
...While I know that the victimizer is responsible for the victim being down, the victim must be responsible for getting up...
...He has views that are obviously liberal, but he also has ideas that appeal to conservatives...
...If I were to sum this up in a sentence, I would say one thing...
...Now what is so special about the Third World...
...Richard Hatcher, the mayor of Gary, Indiana, who is one of the few black leaders campaigning for Jackson, has 10ng criticized "the highpriced attorneys who defend the scum and vermin in our communities and then returr!, to their suburban homes...
...In his stump speeches--which are significantly underreported in the press--Jackson continues to emphasize old-fashioned values of discipline and hard work...
...Right from the beginning, it had always seemed to me that the one thing black people did not want was to be constantly regarded as different, but simply to be treated the same as everybody else...
Vol. 17 • May 1984 • No. 5
