Francis Berry’s comparison of Donald Trump to Jesse Jackson is obnoxious on its face. But, okay, let’s take a quick look. The basic idea is that Jackson led in the polls throughout much of 1987 and yet he wasn’t really prepared to be president and took stances on many issues that, regardless of intrinsic merit, were far too unpopular with the general electorate to risk making him the Democratic Party’s nominee.
See the similarity, now?
The next step is to see what the Democratic Establishment did about the threat of Jesse Jackson and his coalition.
For Berry, this was a process. The ultimate solution was crafted by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and involved addressing the party’s weaknesses. In particular, the party had to stand up to the teachers’ unions and support charter schools, stand up to the industrial unions and support free trade, and get tough with poor people and criminals. This meant the party had to reform welfare and send a generation of minorities to prison for drug crimes.
All of this was done, and yet it didn’t prevent the eventual ascendency of Jesse Jackson’s coalition or their ultimate rejection of most of this corrective action.
That’s Berry’s story, anyway, and I’m sure you’ll want to quibble about the details.
His point is that the Democrats dealt with their Jesse Jackson problem but they didn’t make it go away.
Donald Trump and his priorities, by contrast, are unlikely to enjoy a similar revival twenty to twenty-five years down the line. Sideline him now, and he and his issues will go straight to the dustbin of history. Demographic changes will make sure of that.
So, have heart, Republican moderates wherever you are, you won’t have to deal with this problem twice.
There are some pieces of wisdom in this piece and some food for thought, but it’s needlessly risible.
Here’s your first clue that there’s something essential missing from this analysis: who and where are the newly ascendant wing of the Republican Party? What’s their future?
I don’t see a future.
The problem is fundamental: The main thing that holds the Republican base together is their fear and loathing for everyone else. This is why I don’t see Trump getting elected by insisting that he’s going to make Mexico pay for his wall. (It’s all about management, by the way. Good management.) That and other things will motivate a significantly larger number of people to vote against him than for him.
…making up stories. Sheez.
This one is definitely weird. Unlike Trump, Jackson had been politically active for a long time before 1988. Not seeing where Trump attended the 2012 GOP convention and he wasn’t one of the many speakers at it. Unlike Jesse Jackson at the 1984 DEM convention.
A projection to make the analogy work would go like this:
It’s not #6 that’s difficult to believe could happen, but #4 and #5. FDR and later for a while LBJ tamed that tiger, but it never went away.
FDR, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson all had at least two big things going for them: They were intelligent, and they were all good politicians (FDR and LBJ were GREAT politicians, Kennedy and Truman were better than average).
I don’t see intelligence anywhere in the Republican Party. Not on the bench, not in the house, not in the Senate, not in Governor’s mansions, not in the immediate past.
I see a few politicians in the Senate (Coryn, McConnell, Collins) Maybe one in the Governors Mansions (Kasich) and (really) only one in the immediate past (he wrote derivative, boring and unbelievable fiction and not very good history books).
Unless and until the R’s find intelligence and political savvy they will not find the White House. Please note that I say nothing about the State Houses or congress (Tom Cotton and Paul LePage spring to mind).
Agree. Difficult to assess JFK because his time in office was so short and he didn’t have a chance to move into a political maturation stage. It’s a three legged stool IMH — intelligence, talent, and maturation. Another six to eight years in the Senate before becoming President and he could have ended up at the top of the heap like FDR.
“… (really) only one in the immediate past (he wrote derivative, boring and unbelievable fiction and not very good history books).”
Lived in Georgia, right?
The making America great thing probably is revivable at least as long as the elites keep pillaging the country. So forever.
The best parallel I can think of is Gary Hart after he got back in the race in late ’87.
Hart lead nationally, and in Iowa and New Hampshire for about a month.
His numbers faded in Iowa first, and then elsewhere, and once he tanked in Iowa he was done.
No one believed he would win – and I don’t believe Trump will win. Had he done better longer the Party would have fought him – but it never got that far.
But Hart did lead for over a month.
The anger Trump represents is a lasting feature in American politics, and is really nothing terribly new.
Why would the party have fought Hart? He was early DLC’ish.
It’s interesting how the New Democrats defeated the New Deal Dems and the New Left Dems (though the latter were pretty much gone as a faction at this time) not through their own efforts but by swooping down and declaring victory after the other groups got crushed by the Reagan Coalition.
Even when the New Deal Dems were mortally wounded, the New Democrats couldn’t beat them in a fair fight in 1980/1984. Hell, Dukakis won the primary through a pretty Trump-ish situation in 1988 with the opposition splitting the vote. The standardbearer of the last gasp of the New Left being Jesse Jackson didn’t help much, either, except in (not so) ironically the South.
I really wish Mondale had become our President in 1984. More than Gore in 2000, more than McGovern in 1972, more than Truman in 1952 — and I love me some Truman. The wonders this country could work if we had a New Deal Dem with a Democratic Congress for four more years during that time period. Ah, well.
Truman?
I basically consider the US transitioning from capitalism to fascism under his watch. Desegregating the Army was OK, but creating the NSA and CIA seems to be a long-lasting problem with the US actually remaining a functioning representative democratic republic rather than an inverted totalitarian empire-proper.
You make me laugh my ass off.
America made the transition from democracy to violent herrenvolk (the worst parts of fascism) if not by the end of Reconstruction then certainly with the rise of the second incarnation of the KKK. We did the worst parts of imperialism if not by Polk then by McKinley.
Face it. America was always this violent and fucked up. What’s different is that you’re just now noticing it.
As for why I rate Truman so highly: he’s pretty much the only President besides Obama, Lincoln, and maybe Carter and Hoover I could see standing up to McArthur in that highly charged situation. And considering the consequences of nuclear war, I very highly prize anyone with the gumption not to let us be frog-boiled into that situation.
Also, Truman was the one who kept up 90% tax rates on the rich after the war.
What more do you want, exactly?
No, I’m not just now noticing. I often use the term Empire when referring to the US, which most liberals still stray from because it’s not polite. I also always qualify drones as drone terrorism, because the US government commits terrorism-proper, on an almost daily basis, out-murdering people across the globe than every single terrorist organization and individual, hands down.
You’re not talking to a HRC fan. I’m more of a Chomsky guy, if that gives you any indication of my grasp of violence, and the inherent problems with almost every single hierarchy that has ever existed, and still exists today.
From the very first contact with Native Americans and African slaves, the people who have conquered this continent have been violent. In fact, when discussing pure violence, I’d argue that Americans were better at killing off “others” than the Nazis. Hell, the Nazis killed their slaves wholesale. Americans made them into chattel property to be handed down through wills, based solely on race.
The US government invaded and took land from Mexico, tried against Canada but got its ass handed to it, and even invoked a catchy slogan to attach to the concept of Native American genocide – Manifest Destiny – that predated Hitler’s Lebensraum.
What I’m talking about with “Fascism”, is the US government maintaining permanent war status after WWII. In essence, the US has never shut down its war machine after WWII, and has clearly increased it monumentally. I won’t even get into the US government importing fascists from Germany to help the transition along.
Truman isn’t some mini-Hitler, but the US was sliding towards what most humans would identify as “fascism” starting in the 40s. Again, permanent war status, House Unamerican Activities, blacklisting/communist scares, the continued attack on labor, e.g. Taft-Hartley, and f-ing of course “Cold War” policy, the NSA Act, the CIA, and something from Truman: Loyalty Oaths.
Sure, Truman desegregated the Army, kept tax rates where they were, and generally didn’t go toppling multiple democratic countries around the globe like Ike!, but if you are going to ask me who I’d rather have had, then I’d have loved it if Henry Wallace had not been replaced by Truman, and had succeeded FDR.
Truman was alright, I’m not trying to blame him from what I consider to be the US transition to fascism-proper during the mid-to-late 40s, but I personally date it to his time as President, for whatever it’s worth.
Violence has been intimately involved in almost every single relationship since before humans were fully human. I’m talking about actual policies that have just about cemented it all into place. In essence, before 1947-49, I think we could have turned the war machine to low and perhaps achieved some European-esque things that are now virtually impossible.
Henry Wallace, while I’m sure could be painted as super soft on communism and in retrospect, perhaps clearly a 1 term inefficient President as Communist-fever started up. Perhaps Republicans would have really taken over in ’53 had Wallace been President. But, he may have not been as concerned with a Cold War as Truman. Maybe that would have turned out bad or not. Maybe substantive things that happened in the mid-to-late 40s wouldn’t have happened. Who knows.
But I’m just responding to what you said, and was interested in Truman’s loss to Ike as a potential turning point in US history, rather than just a few years earlier when the machine was turned onto HIGH, with the switches and levers controlling it broken off and thrown into a pit somewhere in North Korea.
I’d put the United States’ transition to “fascism” (i.e. violent herrenvolk police state supported by corporatism) shortly after the fall of Reconstruction. Not just because of Jim Crow and legalized terrorism (though it was a big component) but also because of the violent crackdown on labor and the U.S. really cranking up the imperialism. The Battle of Blair Mountain versus anything the government did to ‘communists’ and civil rights activists? No contest.
The Red Scares, both of them, were nothing compared to how mercilessly the US police state put the screws to unionism. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that they weren’t awful, but if you’re trying to game out the moment where the United States became a fascist imperialist police state your timeline is waaaay off. Any analysis that states that the McCarthy block was more of an affront to America’s democratic innocence than the Cleveland block is suspect on a utilitarian and historical level.
December 1963 Truman explains.. Didn’t anticipate the Dulles bros taking over State and CIA nor did he know their true character in real time (not that many VIPs did and JFK may have only seen the tip of the iceberg wrt Dulles, which was more than others, but not enough).
They were scared of the affair – they thought he was completely unelectable.
Gary Hart was an elected official before he ran for President. Trump’s never been elected. That’s about all he had in common with Jesse(well, Jesse discovered politics made some easy money before Trump did).
What’s telling about our politics is that the politicians running for President on the GOP side don’t know how to deal with Trump. I guess you can’t do anything about the guy in the Superman shirt from Goonies if you’re the gimp from Pulp Fiction. Trump sees the freak show for what it is and milking it for all it’s worth.