A SHARP CRITIQUE OF JESSE JACKSON

...That failure has manifested itself in two interrelated ways...

...Reed shows the problem with this explanation: "Jackson's initiative had little authenticity as a protest candidacy because it never clearly specified the nature of the protest...

...The fundamental and most dubious claim" that Jackson made, "that he was the individual repository of the racial voice, went unchallenged" in the public forum...

...Along with a new conception of leadership, and a new programmatic agenda, there is also a need to "cultivate a spirit of civic liberalism in Afro-American politics...

...Paper, $5.95 Jesse Jackson is an important figure in American politics and a 1984 presidential candidate who stands ready to repeat that race in 1988...

...Anyone doubting the general accuracy of Reed's argument on this point need only study or ponder the ideological evolutions—or devolutions—apparent in the political careers of major black mayors such as Andrew Young and Marion Barry, among others...

...Jackson," he writes, "may be limited in his capacity for programmatic vision by his idiosyncratic opportunism, inconstancy, and self-aggrandizement," but "his lack of critical direction resonates with a much more general state of affairs in the black community...

...Reed emphasizes the campaign's lack of a programmatic agenda more than the potentially sharper critique that the Jackson candidacy never propounded a clear or coherent political strategy...

...First, in what is by far the least persuasive and most poorly handled portion of his book, Reed attempts to argue that Jackson's campaign provided little stimulus for black voter registration and turnout, even in the South, and that Jackson's candidacy also gave little if any "coattail effect" to black contenders in congressional or local races at those same times...

...Unable to distinguish between a social movement and a group of people shouting in a church," reporters unquestioningly accepted Jackson as the spokesman for all of black America...

...As a result, "the successful incorporation of black leadership into regular channels of policy negotiation" over the past two decades has been a "mixed blessing...

...Nonetheless, this caveat does not undercut the strength of Reed's argument concerning both the superiority of electorally responsive leaders and the need for a redistributively-oriented political agenda among black American leaders...

...The entrenched elites," Reed writes, "have been able with impunity to identify collective racial interest with an exceedingly narrow class agenda...

...Reed makes extensive and good use of a distinction between what he terms the "protest elite"— nonpublic officials holding church or organizational roles that used to earn the designation "civil 118 rights leaders"—and a newer electoral elite composed of black elected officials...

...Reed expands upon his second, programmatic complaint to reach what is the third overarching theme of the book...

...Dissent must be dissociated from the stigma of race treason...

...REED ARGUES THAT BOTH BLACK PROTEST and electoral leaders have emphasized political issues that speak more to the interests of the economically 119 better-off segment of black America than to the needs of the growing black underclass...

...Reed firmly and explicitly calls for a fundamentally more open and fundamentally more honest debate among progressive Afro-American political activists, a debate that will brush aside the demand that blacks refrain from airing disagreements outside "the family...

...Affirmative action, high-level job appointments, and minority set-aside programs, he says, are concerns that are more attuned to those who are already well off or on their way up than to those with economically bleak or desperate futures...

...Rather than drawing their authority from the ballot box, or any other form of accountable community endorsement, protest spokespersons "derive their authority indirectly through recognition by public officials, private elites, and public opinion media...

...The core of Reed's argument is that in the post-Voting Rights Act era, black elected officials—politicians responsible at the ballot box to an identifiable constituency—are vastly preferable, especially in terms of democratic theory, to black "leaders" such as Jackson, whose representational status is not grounded in any direct, formal linkage to an electoral base...

...Second, a major reason for the elites' limited policy agenda is their "century-long pattern of uncritical acceptance of fundamental power relations in the general society and reliance on external sources of legitimation...

...That assumption of a perfect identity results in "an authoritarian demand for unity that suppresses the right to disagree within the race...

...In addition to the news media, Reed sees the white left as a second political element that accepted Jackson's supposed status far too readily and uncritically...

...The "price of 'effective' participation" for America's current-day black elite has been "the inability to advance the concrete interests of a substantial element of the black constituency...

...He argues that in an era when black Americans participate freely in the electoral process, and have won the mayoralties of many major cities as well as significant positions in Congress, the continued presence of a protest elite, symbolized most visibly by Jackson, is superfluous...

...The political scientist in Reed leads him towards a somewhat excessively optimistic view of the potential of these elected officials...

...In many instances they too, at least as much as Jackson, have displayed little more than a pro forma interest in the underclass and no inclination towards redistributive policies...

...Reed is calling for a fundamental transformation of Afro-American politics, and for a transformation that will feature the creation of an explicitly redistributive policy agenda aimed at serving the pressing needs of the black underclass...

...It is authoritarian, Reed argues, because it operates with the presumption that positions articulated by the leader are necessarily identical to the interests of the apparent constituents...

...what then was the purpose of concentrating upon the acquiring of convention delegates...

...It is undemocratic because it largely lacks mechanisms by which its followers can control or rebuke the apparent spokespersons...

...Jackson knew that he could not be nominated...

...If Reed's attempt to support those claims is unpersuasive, he offers a somewhat stronger case for his second criticism, that the Jackson campaign failed "to generate a coherent political program or a discrete policy agenda...

...To make a protest...

...Reed's critique of Jackson's role, unlike many other attacks, is almost completely theoretical and political, not personal...

...Reed's book should be recognized as an insightful left critique of a phenomenon that many progressives of all colors readily criticize in private but rarely if ever in public...

...Political initiative is exercised in a purely "top down" fashion...

...The main focus for practical political activity within the black community in this context must be breaking down the illusion of a single racial opinion...

...In Jackson's case as well as in less-heralded ones, these condescending white attitudes are reflected in "a troublesome tendency to accept superficially articulate black individuals who will associate with the left as generic racial spokespersons...

...Whites' ready acceptance of Jackson's selfdeclared role, Reed observes, is yet one more manifestation of the longtime assumption that all black people think alike, that black America can and should be spoken for by a single leader, and "that standard principles of political representation do not apply among Afro-Americans...

...Giving no heed to the complaints of some that white progressives supported Jackson's 1984 campaign far less actively than they would have an ideologically similar white candidate, Reed criticizes "the patronizing orientations that define the place of blacks in the purview of liberals and the left" and the "presuppositions" that "reduce to a premise that the black community is peripheral" and hence amount "to a form of racial condescension...

...That situation, Reed says, concerns "the Afro-American elite's general failure of political vision" over the past twenty years...

...He contends that the ministerial leadership tradition out of which Jackson comes is undemocratic, even inherently authoritarian...

...THE "PROTEST" LEADER, Reed contends, is far more dependent on external, nonconstituency sources of support than are elected officials...

...Jackson's public career, especially in the last few years, is a classic example of this phenomenon, in which the American news media played the largest role...

...Beyond his general argument concerning Jackson's fundamentally nonlegitimate political status, Reed also offers a more precisely drawn critique of Jackson's 1984 campaign...

...A necessary part of that transformation will be the gradual but increasing replacement of nonelected spokespersons by elected officials who arguably will be somewhat more attuned to working-class and poverty issues than generally has been the case in recent Afro-American political history...

...In other words, except for a few idiosyncratic instances like Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1965-1968 period, America's black leadership has never been seriously interested in propounding or supporting economically redistributive policies...

...Nonetheless, Jackson is not a credible, legitimate, or desirable leader for black America, argues black Yale political scientist Adolph Reed in this short but immensely stimulating book...

...That "protest" leaders, and Jackson in particular, are not directly accountable to any formal constituency is only one of Reed's points...