Few political figures of the last quarter-century proved as polarizing as the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who died Tuesday at the age of 84. Perhaps it’s fitting that his obituaries range from hagiography to obloquy. True, Jackson inflamed racial tensions for personal enrichment and fudged his biography for political gain more brazenly than his contemporaries. But unlike them, in his quest for self-aggrandizement Jackson frequently stood with the American majority against the donor class and the leadership of both political parties by opposing job-killing trade deals, undeclared wars, and corporate bailouts while uplifting the impoverished Appalachians who now typify the MAGA movement.
On trade, Jackson opposed NAFTA, GATT, and permanent normal trade relations with China. Other nations “employ lobbyists from both parties to control access to their home markets while Uncle Sugar opens up our markets,” noted Jackson. “The American worker can compete with the Mexican worker or the Chinese worker. The American worker cannot compete with slave labor and should not have to.” Competent trade agreements would “raise [foreign] standards and not lower our own.”
Jackson routinely exposed self-defeating corporate welfare that disadvantaged American workers. “It does not make sense to close down 650,000 family farms in this country while importing food from abroad subsidized by the U.S. government,” Jackson proclaimed in his “Keep Hope Alive” speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. “It does not make sense to be escorting all our tankers up and down the Persian Gulf, paying $2.50 for every $1 worth of oil we bring out, while oil wells are capped in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.”
In the Clinton-Bush years, Jackson’s rhythmic cadences and the populist Right’s rhetoric became indistinguishable. “We are required to pay $50 billion to the government of Mexico. For whose benefit?” asked TAC founder Pat Buchanan at Ross Perot’s 1995 United We Stand America Conference. “Not for the benefit of working Americans. It was for the benefit of investment bankers on Wall Street.” Jackson would tell the same audience that President Bill Clinton’s “bailout did not bail out the American workers … It bailed out the speculators and the investors.”
The two found common cause so frequently that a condescending interlocutor from the Council on Foreign Relations asked Buchanan ahead of his 2000 presidential campaign, “Who will be the vice presidential candidate of the Halloween Coalition: Will it be Ralph Nader or Jesse Jackson?”
Like Buchanan, Jackson opposed U.S. foreign adventurism in Panama, Iraq (both times), Serbia, and regime change in Libya (though not Somalia or Haiti). “Why are we spending $1.5 trillion defending Europe and Japan from Russia?” asked Jackson. “Let Europe and Japan share more of the burden of their own defense… They can afford it, and we need the money to reinvest in our own country.”
The quest to form a political constituency demanding Washington shift from Cold War military spending to hyper-Keynesianism animated Jackson’s political career. Laying the groundwork for his abortive 2000 presidential campaign, Jackson sought white support by leading a bipartisan coalition including Rev. Jerry Falwell, Willie Nelson, and Martin Sheen on a tour of Appalachian poverty in 1998. Discussing a radically different Russo-American relationship, Jackson told thousands in Nelsonville, Ohio, “In Russia, when the ruble falls, we assume something is wrong with the system and come in with a [stabilization] plan. But for the people in the hills of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, we assume something is wrong with them.”
Jackson’s personal peccadilloes stifled his presidential campaign. But he impressed the issue on Bill Clinton, who briefly plagiarized Jackson’s speeches—particularly the insight that Appalachian kids often live in trailers and go to school in trailers. Clinton launched his New Markets Initiative in Hazard, Kentucky; dribbled out grants through the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC); and expanded opportunity zones. Then he championed China’s accession to the World Trade Organization.
The subsequent China shock cost native-born Americans millions of jobs, strengthened the Chinese Communist Party, and decimated small towns and rural areas to this day. “White and [b]lack employment remained lower in 2019 relative to their employment levels in 2000 in highly trade-affected areas,” according to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve. Replacing good-paying manufacturing jobs held by white and black males with low-paying jobs taken by women, Hispanics, and Asians fomented a lasting “demographic and generational transformation” of Rust Belt communities.
Like U.S. industry, funding for America’s rural poor has been sent overseas. “Since 1965, ARC has invested over $6 billion in more than 34,000 economic development projects across Appalachia,” boasts ARC’s website. Yet the U.S. has committed $128 billion to Ukraine since 2022. Foreign aid to Israel for missile defense since 2023 has exceeded the total amount of grants dispersed by ARC during its 59-year history by $700 million.
In 1999, poverty in 30 Appalachian counties topped 30 percent, nearly three times the national average. Two decades later, that number remains nearly unchanged. Appalachia’s status as “The Other America” has continued unabated from LBJ’s War on Poverty, to RFK Sr.’s 1968 campaign, to Jackson’s visit, to Hillbilly Elegy, to the present.
Jackson’s willingness to discuss Appalachia inspired long-lasting affection. On Tuesday, Vice President J.D. Vance revealed he had “a close family member who voted in two presidential primaries in her entire life: Donald Trump in 2016 and Jesse Jackson in 1988.” President Donald Trump personified his base’s diverse sentiments by praising Jackson and Rush Limbaugh on the same day.
Jackson’s America would not be a better America; indeed, it might not be America at all. His “Rainbow Coalition” paved the way for Obama’s overtly racialized Democratic Party of minorities, LGBTQ activists, labor unions, and white progressives. Jackson waved the bloody shirt, exaggerated every perceived sleight into a new Selma-style civil rights violation, shook down corporations to benefit friends and family, embraced socialists and far-leftists, lionized Hugo Chavez as a practitioner of Matthew 25 while demeaning America’s Founding Fathers as slave owners, demanded “universal” same-day voter registration, and insisted the descendants of white abolitionists owe never-enslaved blacks “reparations.”
Jackson’s lasting contribution to American civic life is exacerbating every hostility, deepening every fissure, and picking every scab on the national body politic. His lasting accomplishments consist primarily of making race relations more fraught and demagogic, Democrats more extreme, elections less secure, and Americans less united. Perhaps most consequentially, few of his sermons revolved around the Bible, spiritual life, or how to prepare a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ.
When asked about the afterlife—frequently when pressed about his opportunistic embrace of abortion, which he once described as “genocide”—Jackson replied that God judges us on our overall “box score.” If Jackson struck out more often than not, it’s all the more reason to celebrate his good actions and remember the decency demanded of our shared humanity by praying for his soul.
Jesse Jackson, RIP. May his memory be eternal.
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