Jesse Jackson Paved the Way for a New US Left
With his two unabashedly left-populist campaigns for president in 1984 and 1988, Jesse Jackson opened the door to Bernie Sanders’s presidential runs — and a reborn American socialist movement.
A renewed American left grew in the wake of Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaign. And those two Sanders presidential campaigns owed a great deal to Jesse Jackson. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)
The Reverend Jesse Jackson passed away this week at the age of eighty-four years old. A national figure and leader in civil rights, international diplomacy, and the Democratic Party, he occupied a space few could in US politics.
While much less prominent in his final years as illness took him away from the spotlight, Jackson’s influence is felt today in many ways. One major impact is how left-wing challenges in Democratic Party presidential primaries with a socialist influence or character have grown over the past four decades.
Jackson was a major presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries in 1984 and 1988, winning over 1,200 delegates in his final race — over triple what he had in the first campaign. But his legacy was defined less in quantifiable delegate counts than in qualitative success, in showing how multiracial politics could advance economic justice.
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