Why not jackson?
Maker, Michael
MI am writing more than a month before the New Jersey Democratic primary, in which I shall not vote for Jesse Jackson. That would hardly be a fact worth mentioning except that large segments of...
...That is an important thing to do, and watching him on television—even more, watching the response he evokes among black Americans—I hope that he succeeds...
...and he is not interested anyway...
...But Debs and Thomas (and King, too) stood in a moral and political as well as an oratorical tradition and they were genuinely committed to, even if they finally failed at, building a movement...
...The price for all this is Jackson's own arrival: a price the country can well afford to pay...
...What kind of a leftist is he (or was he...
...On his way to the mainstream, Jackson has been forced, again and again, to abandon his old opinions for the sake of his new positions...
...He is capable of bringing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of disenfranchised men and women into national politics...
...q 268 • DISSENT...
...Jackson is the sort of leftist who gets better as he moves toward the center...
...Resentment and illusion come together in a certain kind of Third World politics...
...I am wary of him for the same reason that I am wary of them: out of a suspicion that the apology for authoritarian ugliness abroad will one day infect politics at home...
...And, as with all the other media politicians, the members of his entourage are lucky if they can find time to explain to him what his positions are before they are made public...
...Perhaps the rallying is an example of the kind of affirmative action that always leaves me uneasy: choose the minority candidate even when he or she isn't the best available candidate...
...Their arrival will be a valuable experience, both for them and for their fellow citizens...
...No doubt he has opinions of his own (about which more later), but his campaign positions come from his entourage...
...August Bebel once described anti-Semitism as the socialism of fools, and Jackson's opinions about the Jews (even today, when all he seems to believe is that Jews are inordinately powerful in American politics) SUMMER • 1988 • 267 and, more clearly, his opinions about Zionism, fit into a standard mold of left-wing foolishness—a compound of populist resentment and ideological illusion...
...he is improved by opportunism...
...In fact, he speaks for new oppressors...
...They think he represents a resurgent left and that his campaign has something of the quality of a political movement...
...If we are looking for a leader, even for a speaker, we need to look for someone else...
...I see only a man, an entourage, and a highly mobilized but limited constituency...
...Jackson is not similarly committed...
...What he says is often just silly, as in his much quoted concession about the infamous Pol Pot: "Sometimes the best of people do become cruel and repressive...
...was), works hard and well within it...
...Traditions of oratory that go back to the popular preaching of the Reformation have survived and prospered in the black community and Jackson, though he is not a master of the tradition (as Martin Luther King, Jr...
...But his statements, silly and not silly, hang together...
...The Democratic party has to deal with Jackson, find him a place, allow his positions (but not his opinions) into the platform, and, most important of all, reach out to his followers...
...they constitute a more or less coherent worldview in which liberal and democratic values have, to put it cautiously, no secure place...
...But we on the left don't have to deal...
...Leaping to the ideological defense of every Third World state that is hostile to the United States, Jackson makes himself into the mirror image of all those right-wingers who leap to defend every Third World state that calls itself pro-American...
...Here, too, I wish him well, for mostly the positions that his entourage provides are superior to the opinions that he once provided for himself...
...I suppose that his intention is to endorse what he takes to be a global uprising against imperialist oppression...
...Jackson's historical role is to establish, for the first time, a major black presence in the political mainstream...
...But I shall assume that most leftists who support Jackson do so because they believe he is the best candidate...
...we are too small...
...Over the years, Jackson has been either a defender of or an apologist for a wide range of revolutionaries-in-power—in Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Libya, Syria, and Cuba—and for a relatively more narrow range of revolutionaries-out-of-power, for example the PLO and the Salvadoran FMLN...
...Certainly the man knows how to talk to his constituency...
...He is a media politician, aiming at the mainstream, moving very fast...
...Since there is a sense in which Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas stood in the same tradition, it is possible to imagine Jackson as a leader of or, at least, a spokesman for the left...
...Jackson is an enemy of American intervention in the Third World, and here I usually agree with him...
...But a leader of the left must often be brutally critical of regimes that he would nonetheless protect, if he could, against the Marines...
...That would hardly be a fact worth mentioning except that large segments of the American left (including the Democratic Socialists of America, part of our own segment) have rallied to Jackson's support...
Vol. 35 • July 1988 • No. 3
