Since Jackson, the most leftish candidate in each Dem presidential primary without an incumbent has lost. Brown, Bradley, Dean, Edwards, and Sanders all had a plausible shot at winning and lost. But we may now be into a scenario where given the composition of the Dem electorate that may flip and the most progressive candidate may start winning these races.
Tangent: I wish people would stop saying "20 years ago" or "30 years ago" as if 30 years ago were 1931. 30 years ago was 1996, and things were actually going pretty well!
Hey, thanks, commentators - glad to learn from all these non-poor people, in the reactions to a Jesse Jackson obituary, that poverty isn't a problem anymore! I'll sure sleep easier now, knowing that.
Come on, you can tell the difference between “poverty isn’t a problem anymore” (not true) and “poverty in 2026 is very different from what it was in 1946” (true).
My apologies in advance if we all end up in 1946-style poverty because the AI-controlled robots have seized all resources for themselves.
Well . . . I confess to being a bit snarky! But candidly, what I really don't like very much is the inverse tendency amongst the more Randian subset of MY's commentariat, upon noting the fact that today, unlike in 1950, the bottom quintile of the income distribution enjoys indoor plumbing, mobile phones and television, or to note the fact that America's poor people would be considered as rich as Croesus if they lived in Burundi, as reasons to hand-wave away the idea that poverty is a problem worthy of attention in the contemporary United States. The fairest criticism of the particular strain of ramped-up DEI-consciousness often hippie-punched in these pages, at least in my view, is that, by analyzing poverty, especially racially-inflected poverty, as something arising out of many many peoples' collective flawed unmediated consciousness, rather than as a socioeconomic problem that the polity should be trying to figure out how to solve or ameliorate by conventional socioeconomic means, "DEI-consciousness" gave lots of people an excuse not to think about poverty! This is when median Black net worth in the U.S. is about 16% of median white net worth and median Black income in the U.S. is about 64% of median white income - not numbers that exactly suggest that race-tinged poverty is a problem that has been solved. And to broaden the point beyond the specific racial disparity, I defy any fair-minded person to spend a week driving through (former) coal country in Appalachia, or the Mississippi Delta, or tribal reservations in the Plains States, or the less salubrious quarters of our dozen biggest cities, and reach the conclusion that, because an overwhelming majority of the people who live there defecate indoors, we no longer need to pay much attention to rhetoric, no matter how inspiring, that tries to draw our attention to poverty in our very prosperous nation.
"From the standpoint of 2026, I might emphasize a few other dimensions of catastrophic risk ahead of (or at least alongside) nuclear weapons, but it remains a broadly excellent mission statement. And I’m struck by the reality that basically no progressive-versus-moderate factional squabbling actually relates to those issues."
"Analysis of 40 peace processes since the end of the Cold War shows that, in cases where women were able to exercise a strong influence on the negotiation process, there was a much higher chance that an agreement would be reached than when women’s groups exercised weak or no influence. In cases of strong influence of women an agreement was almost always reached."
Female negotiators are more likely to emphasize economic recovery, health, and education in peace talks, whereas male negotiators focus more on territorial control, power-sharing, and military integration.
One interesting irony about Jackson's 88' run: he was one of the few* major contenders for the crown that Richard Ben Cramer wasn't able to get close to when researching his classic What It Takes (Richard himself has said this was partially his own fault as he didn't take Jackson that seriously at first). But he does appear in the narrative at several key moments, particularly the high water mark of his campaign after he won the Michigan caucuses which was a big deal at the time.
*No i didn't forget about Mr. Bowtie Paul Simon Ben! Also Pat Robertson, but who wants to read about that guy's inner world LOL.
It's always interesting to me how haters of Jackson always talk about his own personal failings (and there's a lot of ammo there!) while largely ignoring the substance of his ideas which I think are much more interesting to debate.
I think a lot of his ideas are just not applicable in 2026. As others have pointed out, the type of grinding poverty he spoke about thankfully, for the most part, doesn't exist anymore. And the coalition he tried to stitch together has some elements that are less relevant today.
With a few tweaks his 1988 speech at the DNC seems very relevant to me today:
"It does not make sense to be invading Venezuela to get their oil while oil wells are capped in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. I just want to make sense.
Leadership must meet the moral challenge of its day. What's the moral challenge of our day? We have public accommodations. We have the right to vote.
What's the fundamental challenge of our day? It is to end economic violence. Plant closings without notice — economic violence. Even the greedy do not profit long from greed — economic violence.
Most poor people are not lazy. They are not black. They are not brown. They are mostly White and female and young. But whether White, Black or Brown, a hungry child without a school lunch's belly turned inside out is the same color — color it pain, color it hurt.
Most poor people are not on welfare. Some of them can't find a job that matches the address. Others can't because they can't get the right occupational license. They work hard everyday. I know, I live amongst them. They catch the early bus. They work every day. They raise other people's children. They work everyday.
They clean the streets. They work everyday. They deliver your burritos. They change the beds you slept in in these hotels last night and can't get a union contract. They work everyday.
No, no, they're not lazy. Someone must defend them because it's right and they cannot speak for themselves. They work in hospitals. I know they do. They wipe the bodies of those who are sick with fever and pain. They empty their bedpans. They clean out their commodes. No job is beneath them, and yet when they get sick they cannot lie in the bed they made up every day. America, that is not right! We are a better Nation than that!" https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-the-dlc-got-wrong
He seems to represent a certain kind of irrational politics. He made good speeches but no one expected delivery, I am not sure he cared if the policies he supported were effective, I don't think his opponents did either.
Given how far her son went Jackson's mom was likely a very smart lady. If she'd been born in 1994 vs 1924 she would likely have gone to college and gone on to a professional career. But in the south in the 1920s there were intense racist and sexist forces in place to make that essentially impossible and poverty was the result.
Would it be fare to say that the kind of intense poverty Jackson and his family experienced would today be largely confined to people who, through no fault of their own, are facing intense challenges of a different nature - substance abuse, mental illness etc?
And for those on the left they are still too focused on the structural forces rather than the real issues faced by the desperately poor.
Think about the knock on effects of that racism and sexism. If she had been a white male born in 1924, she would have gone to college for free on the GI Bill, then gone on to an upper middle class life with a nice home and small portfolio. Her kids, especially if they were male, would have gone to very good schools, graduated with little to no debt, built their own wealth, inherited their mother's, and been a position today to transfer that multigenerational advantage to their kid born in 1994. Absent being as extraordinary as Jesse Jackson, the first person in that family likely to go to college is the one born in 1994, or maybe 1984, and already down two generations of at least some passed on prosperity.
I'm in my early sixties, I know for certain that the early jobs I had that kickstarted my career would not have been offered to anyone not white, and only maybe gone to someone not male.
Generational wealth transfer means past disadvantages still compound today. $1 invested in the S&P 500 in 1960 would be worth about $70 today after adjusting for inflation. So to catch up with the heirs of so someone who was allowed to make money in 1960 and pass it down, a person today would have to make 70 times more money. That’s a tall order.
You can see this in housing too—someone could’ve bought land for a house in SF for peanuts 100 years ago (or even received it for free), that someone today needs to be a high-ranking executive at Google to buy. If your ancestors had gotten that land cheaply you have a massive advantage over someone who has to work very hard today to buy it. Even if someone with ancestors who did not have those opportunities converged to their ability in terms of income they still would be severely disadvantaged in buying a house over someone who just inherits it.
That's not what adoption studies say. Kids adopted at birth end up much more like their biological parents than their adoptive parents. Nature being much more important than nurture.
Yes, this is something I've brought up here before -- 21st Century progressives by and large do a poor job of engaging with the fact that in the developed world there are very few "deserving poor" in Victorian terms today, i.e., people who really do just need "a hand up" to get on a fairly stable life course, compared to what existed in the 19th to early 20th Centuries.
It really, really depends on your definition of “poor.” You’re right that there’s way less of the utter “I live in a shack with an outhouse and no running water” kind of poverty.
But there’s lots of, how do I say it, “deserving precarious” - people who did everything right, who work hard and obey the law, who are one bad event (a major illness or injury, car gets totaled, etc.) away from destitution, and that kind of life is hella stressful.
I don't know if the "did everything right" is good political framing in terms of the non-college suburban Milwaukee swing voting mom. She's looks at her ne'er-do-well relatives and balks at your "did everything right" framing.
I'm sure there are "ne'er-do-well" people who are in a bad position because of their own mistakes and screwups.
But, famously, the Success Sequence the conservatives tout is: 1. graduate high school 2. get a job, any job 3. stay away from crime/gangs 4. wait until after you're married to have children.
You can absolutely do all of the above and still be in a very precarious position, where one bad event (through no fault of your own, like, being hit by a drunk driver) equals financial ruin.
So the driver is uninsured, their job doesn't offer disability insurance, they can't negotiate to pay the out of pocket max from their health insurance ...what chain of events are you envisioning?
Insurance companies screw people all the time, that’s how we got Luigi (doesn’t justify murder of course). Insurance doesn’t actually protect you reliably. I max out the deductible on all my insurance to minimize premiums assuming they won’t actually cover anything lol.
I’m old enough to remember 1988 - I was in college at the time and Jackson came to speak. He was a very impressive speaker in person and what was refreshing is that most of his message to students was about voting and not the usual stump speech stuff. That is one memory from college that has really stuck with me and although I had several disagreements with Jackson, I always respected him after that.
"It takes two wings to fly."
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/jesse/speeches/jesse88speech.html?fbclid=IwdGRleAQF3hdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA8xNzM4NDc2NDI2NzAzNzAAAR6iPkfpxAxlfyD4-aSMdIowmu3blBBpcrdt87TDn0SDunUR_NnvYORYzWmEzA_aem_BUsUQglI0z-EQbQ02CC1uw
Without a robust and genuinely *conservative* wing, Democrats crash. Jackson was no conservative. But he knew that our party needed them.
Instead, we turn them away with contempt, and reap MAGA government instead. :-|
Just gonna leave this here https://vimeo.com/139091477
Since Jackson, the most leftish candidate in each Dem presidential primary without an incumbent has lost. Brown, Bradley, Dean, Edwards, and Sanders all had a plausible shot at winning and lost. But we may now be into a scenario where given the composition of the Dem electorate that may flip and the most progressive candidate may start winning these races.
Great synopsis of an underrated and ahead of his time leader. I feel lucky to have seen him up close in Chicago …. at an anti war protest naturally 😁
Tangent: I wish people would stop saying "20 years ago" or "30 years ago" as if 30 years ago were 1931. 30 years ago was 1996, and things were actually going pretty well!
Now get off my lawn.
Did you know that more time has passed between today and 1985 than passed between the end of World War 2 and 1985?
by a smidge, yes.
Hey, thanks, commentators - glad to learn from all these non-poor people, in the reactions to a Jesse Jackson obituary, that poverty isn't a problem anymore! I'll sure sleep easier now, knowing that.
Come on, you can tell the difference between “poverty isn’t a problem anymore” (not true) and “poverty in 2026 is very different from what it was in 1946” (true).
My apologies in advance if we all end up in 1946-style poverty because the AI-controlled robots have seized all resources for themselves.
Well . . . I confess to being a bit snarky! But candidly, what I really don't like very much is the inverse tendency amongst the more Randian subset of MY's commentariat, upon noting the fact that today, unlike in 1950, the bottom quintile of the income distribution enjoys indoor plumbing, mobile phones and television, or to note the fact that America's poor people would be considered as rich as Croesus if they lived in Burundi, as reasons to hand-wave away the idea that poverty is a problem worthy of attention in the contemporary United States. The fairest criticism of the particular strain of ramped-up DEI-consciousness often hippie-punched in these pages, at least in my view, is that, by analyzing poverty, especially racially-inflected poverty, as something arising out of many many peoples' collective flawed unmediated consciousness, rather than as a socioeconomic problem that the polity should be trying to figure out how to solve or ameliorate by conventional socioeconomic means, "DEI-consciousness" gave lots of people an excuse not to think about poverty! This is when median Black net worth in the U.S. is about 16% of median white net worth and median Black income in the U.S. is about 64% of median white income - not numbers that exactly suggest that race-tinged poverty is a problem that has been solved. And to broaden the point beyond the specific racial disparity, I defy any fair-minded person to spend a week driving through (former) coal country in Appalachia, or the Mississippi Delta, or tribal reservations in the Plains States, or the less salubrious quarters of our dozen biggest cities, and reach the conclusion that, because an overwhelming majority of the people who live there defecate indoors, we no longer need to pay much attention to rhetoric, no matter how inspiring, that tries to draw our attention to poverty in our very prosperous nation.
This is such a terrific post
"From the standpoint of 2026, I might emphasize a few other dimensions of catastrophic risk ahead of (or at least alongside) nuclear weapons, but it remains a broadly excellent mission statement. And I’m struck by the reality that basically no progressive-versus-moderate factional squabbling actually relates to those issues."
Peace talks that include women are 35% more likely to last more than 15 years. https://wps.unwomen.org/participation/
"Analysis of 40 peace processes since the end of the Cold War shows that, in cases where women were able to exercise a strong influence on the negotiation process, there was a much higher chance that an agreement would be reached than when women’s groups exercised weak or no influence. In cases of strong influence of women an agreement was almost always reached."
Female negotiators are more likely to emphasize economic recovery, health, and education in peace talks, whereas male negotiators focus more on territorial control, power-sharing, and military integration.
Jesse Jackson gave a talk at my middle school or high school (I forget which) and he was TERRIFIC.
Would party leaders even know about the needs of "the groups" if people weren't out there advocating for themselves?
Like, would childcare be at the top of the docket right now if women hadn't identified it as a barrier to their success?
And when women are more successful, we all are.
One interesting irony about Jackson's 88' run: he was one of the few* major contenders for the crown that Richard Ben Cramer wasn't able to get close to when researching his classic What It Takes (Richard himself has said this was partially his own fault as he didn't take Jackson that seriously at first). But he does appear in the narrative at several key moments, particularly the high water mark of his campaign after he won the Michigan caucuses which was a big deal at the time.
*No i didn't forget about Mr. Bowtie Paul Simon Ben! Also Pat Robertson, but who wants to read about that guy's inner world LOL.
It's always interesting to me how haters of Jackson always talk about his own personal failings (and there's a lot of ammo there!) while largely ignoring the substance of his ideas which I think are much more interesting to debate.
I think a lot of his ideas are just not applicable in 2026. As others have pointed out, the type of grinding poverty he spoke about thankfully, for the most part, doesn't exist anymore. And the coalition he tried to stitch together has some elements that are less relevant today.
With a few tweaks his 1988 speech at the DNC seems very relevant to me today:
"It does not make sense to be invading Venezuela to get their oil while oil wells are capped in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. I just want to make sense.
Leadership must meet the moral challenge of its day. What's the moral challenge of our day? We have public accommodations. We have the right to vote.
What's the fundamental challenge of our day? It is to end economic violence. Plant closings without notice — economic violence. Even the greedy do not profit long from greed — economic violence.
Most poor people are not lazy. They are not black. They are not brown. They are mostly White and female and young. But whether White, Black or Brown, a hungry child without a school lunch's belly turned inside out is the same color — color it pain, color it hurt.
Most poor people are not on welfare. Some of them can't find a job that matches the address. Others can't because they can't get the right occupational license. They work hard everyday. I know, I live amongst them. They catch the early bus. They work every day. They raise other people's children. They work everyday.
They clean the streets. They work everyday. They deliver your burritos. They change the beds you slept in in these hotels last night and can't get a union contract. They work everyday.
No, no, they're not lazy. Someone must defend them because it's right and they cannot speak for themselves. They work in hospitals. I know they do. They wipe the bodies of those who are sick with fever and pain. They empty their bedpans. They clean out their commodes. No job is beneath them, and yet when they get sick they cannot lie in the bed they made up every day. America, that is not right! We are a better Nation than that!" https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-the-dlc-got-wrong
If that's the direction he'd want to take policy, great! (For the most part)
Jackson wasn't big on policy detail, and funny enough I've been advocating keeping it vague for a while, so that might not be the worst thing.
He seems to represent a certain kind of irrational politics. He made good speeches but no one expected delivery, I am not sure he cared if the policies he supported were effective, I don't think his opponents did either.
Just a thought:
Given how far her son went Jackson's mom was likely a very smart lady. If she'd been born in 1994 vs 1924 she would likely have gone to college and gone on to a professional career. But in the south in the 1920s there were intense racist and sexist forces in place to make that essentially impossible and poverty was the result.
Would it be fare to say that the kind of intense poverty Jackson and his family experienced would today be largely confined to people who, through no fault of their own, are facing intense challenges of a different nature - substance abuse, mental illness etc?
And for those on the left they are still too focused on the structural forces rather than the real issues faced by the desperately poor.
Think about the knock on effects of that racism and sexism. If she had been a white male born in 1924, she would have gone to college for free on the GI Bill, then gone on to an upper middle class life with a nice home and small portfolio. Her kids, especially if they were male, would have gone to very good schools, graduated with little to no debt, built their own wealth, inherited their mother's, and been a position today to transfer that multigenerational advantage to their kid born in 1994. Absent being as extraordinary as Jesse Jackson, the first person in that family likely to go to college is the one born in 1994, or maybe 1984, and already down two generations of at least some passed on prosperity.
I'm in my early sixties, I know for certain that the early jobs I had that kickstarted my career would not have been offered to anyone not white, and only maybe gone to someone not male.
That's all true but it's 2026 and the issues aren't the same.
Generational wealth transfer means past disadvantages still compound today. $1 invested in the S&P 500 in 1960 would be worth about $70 today after adjusting for inflation. So to catch up with the heirs of so someone who was allowed to make money in 1960 and pass it down, a person today would have to make 70 times more money. That’s a tall order.
You can see this in housing too—someone could’ve bought land for a house in SF for peanuts 100 years ago (or even received it for free), that someone today needs to be a high-ranking executive at Google to buy. If your ancestors had gotten that land cheaply you have a massive advantage over someone who has to work very hard today to buy it. Even if someone with ancestors who did not have those opportunities converged to their ability in terms of income they still would be severely disadvantaged in buying a house over someone who just inherits it.
Your own life circumstances are influenced by your parents' life circumstances, though, so the legacy of defunct policies may still persist.
That's not what adoption studies say. Kids adopted at birth end up much more like their biological parents than their adoptive parents. Nature being much more important than nurture.
For IQ, yes. For inherited wealth and social position, no.
Yes, this is something I've brought up here before -- 21st Century progressives by and large do a poor job of engaging with the fact that in the developed world there are very few "deserving poor" in Victorian terms today, i.e., people who really do just need "a hand up" to get on a fairly stable life course, compared to what existed in the 19th to early 20th Centuries.
What a weird term the deserving poor…. Would make a good band name 🤔
It really, really depends on your definition of “poor.” You’re right that there’s way less of the utter “I live in a shack with an outhouse and no running water” kind of poverty.
But there’s lots of, how do I say it, “deserving precarious” - people who did everything right, who work hard and obey the law, who are one bad event (a major illness or injury, car gets totaled, etc.) away from destitution, and that kind of life is hella stressful.
I don't know if the "did everything right" is good political framing in terms of the non-college suburban Milwaukee swing voting mom. She's looks at her ne'er-do-well relatives and balks at your "did everything right" framing.
I'm sure there are "ne'er-do-well" people who are in a bad position because of their own mistakes and screwups.
But, famously, the Success Sequence the conservatives tout is: 1. graduate high school 2. get a job, any job 3. stay away from crime/gangs 4. wait until after you're married to have children.
You can absolutely do all of the above and still be in a very precarious position, where one bad event (through no fault of your own, like, being hit by a drunk driver) equals financial ruin.
So the driver is uninsured, their job doesn't offer disability insurance, they can't negotiate to pay the out of pocket max from their health insurance ...what chain of events are you envisioning?
Insurance companies screw people all the time, that’s how we got Luigi (doesn’t justify murder of course). Insurance doesn’t actually protect you reliably. I max out the deductible on all my insurance to minimize premiums assuming they won’t actually cover anything lol.
Medical bankruptcy is literally the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States.
The play Purposes is based loosely on Jesse Jackson, his family and their foibles and was pretty good. Won a Tony Award.
I’m old enough to remember 1988 - I was in college at the time and Jackson came to speak. He was a very impressive speaker in person and what was refreshing is that most of his message to students was about voting and not the usual stump speech stuff. That is one memory from college that has really stuck with me and although I had several disagreements with Jackson, I always respected him after that.