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, 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.