That level of poverty described in the 1988 speech (which was describing Jackson’s own childhood in the 50s) has become less salient because it just doesn’t really exist in the US today—people do not have outhouses for bathrooms or lack running water or unable to afford socks even in the poorest inner-city areas.
On some level it’s all relative and abundance is just the flip side of the coin. But it does seem to be the death knell for traditional social democratic economics-focused leftism when poverty of the type described by Jackson no longer exists in the first world. Maybe if we had a world government we could revive that type of leftism by focusing on this kind of poverty that does still exist in the third world.
Clearly, I go different places and know different people than you know. That kind of poverty still exists. People who live in camper shells. Or tents on vacant lots. Or worse than that.
Yes, there are a small number of homeless encampments but those problems usually aren’t strictly financial and even they have much better access to healthcare than they used to.
I grew up in a zip code with under half the median US income and am kind of traumatized from that, but most of the trauma was not getting toys I wanted and social stuff like going to crappy public schools with violence and uncaring bureaucracy and not fitting in when I later went to college; I did not know anyone to lack indoor plumbing or running water.
I'm talking about the people who live in crap substandard housing. Come take a tour of Commerce City, Colorado, with me. The women who live in what are basically shacks, and put out requests on Facebook for laundry detergent because their kid needs clean clothes for school. I've driven over with laundry detergent and quarters; I've seen that world.
I'm tooling around the areas closest to major petrochemical and industrial facilities now and it would seem to prove the point: they're 1950's houses with municipal sewer hookups, a car in the driveway, and bikes on the front lawn.
This is not the form "poverty" took when "poverty" was the basis for a working-to-middle-class coalition that could dominate politics.
You gotta pay the water bill and sewer bill, though. One woman I was driving to the doctor had all her...sewage...in big black trash bags beside the house. The smell, my God. The flies. Some of the windows were broken and covered with cardboard. She'd inherited the house from her grandmother. It was disintegrating around her.
Again, though. Not going to be the basis for mass politics.
I'm center-left and in favor of basically every universal and means-tested benefit we have and a few more, but if you want me to genuinely sympathize with the folks you describe, it's going to be hard. Because I too have volunteered and spent a lot of time with people like them, and have found that basically every sinew of agency they have is turned towards the end of making their lives worse.
I support existing social programs, not for the sake of the long-term poor, but for the sake of the transient poor who will, if given a hand, through their own efforts make their way out of poverty within a couple years.
As regards long-term poverty, the best we can do is to build the school system into something that can more ably substitute for a parent and try to rescue as many of their children as possible.
Girding poverty is less common, though—far less common—than in the 1940s and 1950s (the era Jackson was talking about). That's something to be glad about. And overall poverty was roughly cut in half just between 1980 and 2020, never mind what it was back in 1950.
We haven't eradicated poverty, sadly, but we have made it less common, and less severe from a material standpoint (though I doubt it's less painful psychologically).
Sometimes I wonder if the people doing the census and the poverty counts are really finding everyone, though.
Things have improved. I won't deny that. But we affluent Slow Borer types can be kind of dismissive about the people who remain in very bad circumstances.
The long-term homelessness necessary to experience these conditions describes approximately 10-15,000 people in the whole country. In 1950, it described something like 35% of the housing stock. It wasn't until 1970 that only a single-digit percentage of the country's housing lacked *any* indoor plumbing, and until 1990 that only a percent or two lacked full indoor plumbing with sewerage.
It is not, cannot, will never, be the basis for a mass politics.
That is a gross insult to the working poor who live in extreme poverty, for example many of the homeless. Or are too disabled to work. The mentally ill through no fault of their own. Open your eyes and ears. Engage and aid the homeless.
Your comment gives the impression that you assume that those who are mentally ill and in dire poverty, even homeless, are that way through their own fault. Yes, some can't live with family because their illness makes them violent, for example bipolar disorder. But that isn't their fault. It's genetic and they got snake eyes at the gamble of conception. Some don't live with their family because they suffer paranoid delusions against family members. That's usually due to a genetic-based illness. Some families have broken up, each going their own way, none of them with resources to be caretakers -- not the fault of the homeless poor. Some families are selfish and cruel. Some families are criminals.
There is a homeless guy in our town who has tried about 60 times to start brush fires on the hillsides above downtown. The judges keep letting him go because it's not his fault he's bipolar or schizophrenic and there are no (enforced) laws saying he needs to be institutionalized and there are no institutions to send him too. One of these days he may succeed on burning down the town.
You're right, but *politically* the dimensions are very different. It used to be that grinding poverty and the working class went hand-in-hand, some people would be better off than others and have running water or might have an easier time hosting a proper Thanksgiving, but the vast bulk of the working class (even if a bit richer than Jackson describes in his quote) felt extremely precarious and felt real material hardship. It was a self-interested politics of uplifting this broad base of millions of people who could be the core of a voting bloc.
Now, anti-poverty politics is something that is mostly about the compassion of middle class people. Working class voters themselves are not particularly keen on it, largely because they largely have what middle class people would consider extremely reactionary opinions on the very poor, notably that it's mostly their own fault and they don't want to see anyone surviving on welfare when they have to work very hard to provide a (comfortable, but modest) life for their family.
You are talking about a very small number of people in a very large and populous country. Jackson was describing whole neighborhoods common in every town, city, and rural area.
My cousins, boomers, grew up with nothing but an outhouse until the late 1960s, and they were not the poorest people they or I knew.
WIC, food stamps, AFDC, EITC, school lunches, etc., and just the general level of prosperity have driven this kind of poverty down to rates unseen in our or anyone else's history.
In all these cases, people have access to running water and a bathroom; it’s just not exclusively theirs. That’s just qualitatively different from the situation in the 50’s, when whole communities lived like this.
There is still quite a bit of extreme poverty in the US. This is especially evident in homelessness data. The exact figures vary a lot by the source and how you define “homeless”, but there are somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of homeless children.
To your point, these numbers aren’t high enough to drive a mass political movement, but it’s not like we solved poverty either.
Personally, I would much rather live in a house with a slop bucket and no running water than sleep in a shelter ever night. Or not know where my kids will sleep next week.
The extreme poverty the US has left seems to be a downstream affect of disability, mental illness and/or drug addiction. The solutions to reducing current extreme poverty are very different than 70 years ago.
Not the point of your comment, but I know two people around 25-35 years old who grew up in Alaska in middle-class homes with outhouses. They’re apparently common enough if the soil is too unworkable for septic systems.
I feel like a compost toilet and a proper disposal pit are the play there, with an outhouse as a backup. Would much rather bundle up to spend ten minutes emptying the toilet once every few days than fumble my way outside to the bathroom at 6:30 AM.
What does one do with gray water in this situation? Just pump it to an outlet away from and downhill from the house?
Objectively true but I took Matt to mean not a coherent economic message for the 21st century. Sanders attempted to frame the debate between the 99% vs the 1% but clearly hasn’t resonated. Affordability has taken center stage. I don’t think either party has real solutions, and the Dems have long been poor at articulating their message.
I was an adult throughout this period. You fail to mention how the wind was taken out of Jesse Jackson's sails when his organization, Operation PUSH, was rocked with financial mismanagement, scandal and blatant self dealing (shades of Trump). His failure to run his own house efficiently and honestly doomed him to play a far lesser role than he could have.
The 70s movements outlined spectacularly well in Burrough's 'Days of Rage' are almost a mirror image of what is happening with their descendent ideologues today. As you say the post-Vietnam movements of the 70s collapsed under the weight of their own incompetence, and it seems that though learning nothing those ideological children are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
There’s also the assassination of MLK: Jackson claimed to have been next to King when he was shot, and later appeared on camera, with blood on his shirt, claiming to have cradled King in his arms as he lay dying. Eyewitnesses reported instead that Jackson was not on the balcony when King was shot, and that he later smeared blood on his shirt by dipping his hands in the pool remaining after King’s body ws removed.
Jackson was a grubby little grifter from the start.
He leaves a victorious economic legacy -- investments in poverty reduction have grown 10x since the 70s, adjusted welfare benefits exploding from $7500(ish) to $64k for the bottom quintile over that time, fueled by property taxes (60%+ higher) and local taxes (8%>13% of all output) today. The poverty rate commensurately plummeted to 10%ish today in official metrics, but looking at consumption metrics it fell from nearly 33% to 6% today.
As Matt says this is basically unacknowledged by the left and the other side of the coin is the "victorious" social legacy of "intersectionality" he also leaves. The oppressor/oppressed frame today is almost word-for-word unchanged despite those huge gains in economic progressive success.
The economic reality does not match the messaging anymore, but the anti semitic slurs and vitriolic nature of the leftist social politics remains. It cannot last, imo. Without a legitimate economic message to couple the social frame the movement lacks internal coherence. Doordash just reported it's largest jump in orders ever. We can thank Jackson for his work while also recognizing that perhaps it is time for a new movement in democratic politics.
Dylan Matthews has a blog post about how he tried to pitch a book about this fact and highlight the people that were integral to making it happen, but it went nowhere
It's like some kind of insatiable guilt that afflicts the far left and they need something to feed that fire. Compassion is a wonderful thing and a major step in our personal evolution but even that can be overdone (the Buddhists call it idiot compassion).
I agree that there have been massive economic improvements but I don’t think that’s unacknowledged by the left—most of the 50s nostalgia is coming from the right while most on the left seem to agree that the 50s were a crappy time for poor people and that only rich white men had a good time of it then (even as sometimes they are nostalgic for the high tax rates).
Economic improvements also don’t negate the social issues or inequality or the oppressed/oppressor frame (which is usually applied to situations where the oppressed party is genuinely poor and at the mercy of the oppressing party’s superior capacity to do organized violence).
I see no evidence of acknowledgement of economic improvement due to drastic increase in taxation on the left. Quite the opposite -- leftist mayors and governors around the country are chalking up current failures of democratic governance to revenue failures alone.
On the social front, in America today, can you argue with a straight face that it is the 'oppressor class' performing organized violence?
Hey, I think you’re on to something. You know what, I think we should ask our good friends Alex Pretti and Renee Good to give their thoughts about the oppressor class engaging in performing organized violence. Wait, what’s that? They were both murdered by armed agents or the state? And the agents involved have suffered basically zero real consequences for their actions? And their leaders went out smeared the victims with easily disprovable lies?
If you want to make the argument that far left types invoke the “oppressor/oppressed” dynamic way too often as some catch all for every problem in the world? Fine, I have time for that argument. But for you to write the statement you wrote in your last paragraph was an absolute “are you fucking kidding me?!l moment from me. These murders just happened. Do you have the memory of a goldfish?!!
I was waiting for this comment, and it's exactly the sort of frame I think is misguided and wrong.
In the 60s and 70s, the FBI targeted American civil rights leaders, famously wiretapping MLK jr to blackmail him and other civil rights leaders under COINTELPRO. War on Drugs over reach, mass arrests in Birmingham, urban militarization, etc.
Today, far-leftist like you have decided that increases in completely normal immigration enforcement, voted into power in response to Dem leadership abdication of border responsibilities in the prior admin, is seen as de-facto illegitimate and oppressive.
Its awful what happened to Pretti and Good, but bringing an unlicensed gun or ramming a car to interfere with legitimate law enforcement action and having tragedy occur in the commotion that follows is not the same thing at all. It would never have occurred had local law enforcement been able to work with ICE but was prevented under Sanctuary City legislation.
Paradoxically now we have urban white progressives yelling slurs and interfering with overwhelmingly more racially mixed ICE officers while claiming the mantle of the oppressed. I find both sides of the current ICE debate disgusting, and in no way can leftists legitimately claim that this conflict exists within an oppressor/oppressed framework.
"It would never have occurred had local law enforcement been able to work with ICE but was prevented under Sanctuary City legislation."
I'm sorry this is bananas. ICE officers were driven to execute Alex Pretti because months/years earlier, therefore ICE officers were what driven to execute an American citizen? This some real "Murc's law" stuff taken to it's logical endpoint. You realize this is the same logic far leftist people give for rioting in 2020 right? "The people were driven to destroy small businesses because of systematic racism".
Hate to break it to you buddy but the COINTELPRO stuff is happening right now. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-social-media.html. Key pull out quote "The Trump administration has aggressively tried tamping down criticism of ICE, partly by identifying Americans who have demonstrated against the agency. ICE agents told protesters in Minneapolis and Chicago that they were being recorded and identified with facial recognition technology." Again, literally on Monday we had a glaring example of the state making it clear they'll step in to try to stop "speech" they don't like from getting aired.
And sorry the racially mixed ICE is not the "gotchya" you think it is. Collaborators with the state has been a thing for a very long time. Remember this story in Memphis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tyre_Nichols
And as for this "Today, far-leftist like you have decided that increases in completely normal immigration enforcement" Yeah hate to break it to you but only the hardcore base is onboard with the extreme measures taken by ICE. https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-february-2026/ . But to be frank the fact you think that I must be a "far leftist" is kind of all I really need to know where you're coming from. I would really ask you go ahead and look what MattY wrote https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-turning-point-in-minnesota. Seriously, read the whole thing and if you're conclusion is Matt is making a "far leftist" argument I really really don't know what to tell you.
The only way to support the Trump administrations rejection of American values like due process, habeas corpus, free speech, the right to bear arms, etc is to be anti-American.
The whole “you cannot treat these violations of rights and law as illegitimate” is dishonest and circular. It’s basically “you cannot criticize the violation of law because those violating the law are THE LAW.”
You are wrong to frame this as “normal.” Especially since the most effective use of resources would target employers and not random people on the street as a performative action in specific Democratic cities.
You can argue the ‘Kavanaugh Stops’ and at-large raids are retaliatory and not as effective as they could be, but you cannot argue that it's illegitimate oppressors cracking down extra-judicially on an oppressed class of Americans.
The fact that you feel a need to flagrantly lie about the most basic facts of the Good and Pretti shootings (Good did not "ram a car," Pretti's handgun was licensed) in an effort to smear the victims (not to mention idiotically speculate about what would have happened if police departments turned their staff over to ICE to act as additional attack dogs) says all we need to know about this position.
>abdication of border responsibilities in the prior admin
I am really tired of this take. When a ton of people show up at the border claiming asylum, the options are:
1. Saying no.
2. Sending them to deportation proceedings but telling them to stay in Mexico until their immigration court hearing
3. Sending them to deportation proceedings and Imprisoning them in the US until their immigration court hearing
4. Sending them to deportation proceedings and letting them live in the US until their immigration court hearing
Given the costs of options 1-3 (costs to the migrants in 1 and 2, and costs to both the migrants and government of #3), choosing #4 is perfectly reasonable as the best of several bad options, and it is nowhere close to "abdication of border responsibilities"
The US government has responsibilities towards it’s citizens, not migrants or other governments. So, yes, abdication of border responsibilities seems accurate, especially when reverting to Trump’s policies in year 4 wasn’t much of a problem.
(1) was clearly the best option after it started to get bad, but that didn't happen. (4) is what happened but it leads to the huge necessity in increased ICE enforcement we are seeing now as a backlash to that policy. It seems to me that if you accept (4) then you must accept aggressive deportation actions when 7% of the nation of Nicaragua (et al) were not found to be legitimate asylum seekers.
Spending billions to accommodate (4) and then spending hundreds of millions to enforce the rejected claims has imo been an abdication of basic responsibility.
ICE has clearly overreached, which is why the Trump administration decided to back down, but deporting illegal immigrants is not oppression, even if you want to argue that Obama and Clinton were oppressors.
Warrantless searches of what turn out to be citizen households with children held at gunpoint, routine brutality against any civilian nearby, use of force practices that would have made the Soviets in Czechoslovakia in 1968 blush, deliberately declining to accept evidence of citizenship and holding or deporting native-born and naturalized Americans... get back to me when you want to claim that forcibly quartering ICE in local households isn't oppressive, lol.
IDGAF about deporting people with deportation orders in public places or executing judicial warrants for access to private ones, but that's not what's been happening.
Don't the kids in social medias res say that Doordash is cheaper than cooking, because groceries cost too much these days? Seems like there's still an appetite for outdated economic messaging in this economy.
I suspect that with civil rights you have greater sorting of people based on ability and culture. High ability people experience new opportunities to move and remove themselves from areas where bad cultures (a perverse form of Southern honor culture) result in violence and dysfunction.
With the FHA the African American middle class leaves from dysfunctional cities (that were facing fiscal crunches in the 60s and 70s for broader structural issues.) This concentrates dysfunction and bad cultural patterns. Those problems result in the rise of narcotics use and trade. Poverty relief programs exacerbate this only inasmuch as it contributed to the midcentury sorting.
In short, it’s an unintentional market for lemons. This is my hypothesis for why many U.S. cities have crime and dysfunction.
This is an excellent point. Reading about Jesse Jackson's mother, it's obvious she was a more functional person than myself or probably most of the posters here, and it's inconceivable that someone with as much agency as her would be eating turkey carcass on Thanksgiving in 2026.
There’s a lot of whitewashing of some fairly vicious antisemitism, with no counterpart anti black racism, that goes into these anodyne recaps of the black-Jewish relationship - such as the NYT article Matt is cribbing from. The Crown Heights Riot, for example, was very much a unilateral affair. Ah well, I guess I can look forward to explaining to my kids that no, the reason Jews weren’t involved in the Women’s March wasn’t “disagreements about the Palestinians”, and that Tamika Mallory’s relationship with Farrakhan wasn’t some cute sidenote.
On the flip side, Norm Finkelstein referred to Van Jones using uncle Tom and the Yiddish equivalent of the N-word. I found it deeply shocking how little pushback he got for that. He hasn't felt a need to delete the comments. It seems a community that could scarcely proclaim any louder the importance of anti-racism will shrug at people using racial slurs so long as it's in the service of anti-Zionism.
I think MY may be right that a lot of Jackson's vision won out, despite the Clintonian interlude that Obama mostly followed in substance.
I'm not really sure that's a good thing though, not when there aren't enough squares, and where they aren't distributed well for Senate and Electoral College purposes. In terms of big picture I think it's also always interesting how Democrats back in the day took for granted having the working class. You can add 'white' to that if you need to but even though they've been the first to depart the coalition it's under threat across races, and in particular with men.
My take is that the quilt is a lovely metaphor for the political world Jackson inhabited, or at least a plausible enough perspective of it, particularly pre-90s, but it isn't good politics anymore. In the 2020s it's just grievance groups with claims of dubious merit looking for satisfaction against a unified majority that no longer exists. I've said before we need someone with a vision, and part of that vision is going to have to be very deliberately leaving Jackson in the past.
I really strongly disagree that Obama was 'Clintonian' as opposed to closer to the anti-poverty intersectional coalition mold. the ACA burned absolutely enormous amounts of political capital all to help poor people pay for healthcare, and the Obama admin was pretty famous for handing out social issue wins to every constituent 'oppressed' group in the coalition.
It’s striking that Jackson’s death comes just as Mamdani has emerged as a clear standard-bearer for the left. I was a little surprised at how personally affectionate Bernie was when talking about Zohran on Stephen Colbert’s show. Bernie usually frames praise around someone’s grasp of the issues, so hearing him excitedly talk about how much he “loves” Mamdani as a person and what “he loves about him” felt strange.
My read is that Bernie genuinely sees him as competent, disciplined, and movement-ready, someone capable of carrying the project forward. Whether intentional or not, it felt like an early passing of the torch, something that will likely become even clearer upon Bernie’s eventual retirement/passing.
If that’s happening on the left, moderates should be thinking just as seriously about cultivating new blood and leadership rather than defaulting to Newsom or even Whitmer/Shapiro as the best they’ve got. Obama has been out of office for years, and the search for a compelling and inspiring liberal/moderate standard bearer still feels unresolved.
If people like Shapiro and Beshear are able to win in purple and red states and govern effectively, one of them should be able to translate that success by raising their game during a Presidential run. You can’t keep banking on the emergence of a generational talent like Obama to save your party.
FWIW it seems like for the last couple of generations generational talents are the ones who win the White House - Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump. The non-generational talents were all former VPs or the son of a former president.
Clinton and Reagan also had governing experience, unlike Obama or Trump. So, i’m hesitant to attribute their wins purely to political talent. They went through the grind and got political experience.
Even Pritzker seems to have gotten serious since the voters rejected an attempt to end the state's uniformity clause and allow progressive taxation.
The current YIMBY bill he backs, forcing CTA and Metra to undertake reforms and the region to rezone high-transit areas before the state would renew and expand funding, some discussion of *gasps* pension reform...
He's acting like someone who has seen the light on the need to unfuck IL.
Shapiro has done great things on state capacity and public-sector accountability, he's improved the allocation of state funds to local school systems, he's started to beat on PennDOT's worst failings, he's backed some moderate YIMBY moves as he can, he's worked to lower regulatory burdens for business and reduce our corporate tax rate, but at the end of the day he's presiding over divided government in which the GOP desperately wants to tear the heart out of the state's major economic engines no matter how much it harms their own voters, so his ability to enact reforms is limited.
I think Bernie's just more sentimental as he approaches his (inevitable) death. He also took to referring to AOC as "my daughter Alexandria" on a few occasions, which is something you only say about someone for whom you have the deepest kind of affection (and in a very literal sense declares her as his heir)
Yeah. Dude's old as shit. He may just be talking because his lips are flapping. I was never part of the movement, but now more than ever I don't give much of a hoot what the should-be-retired Senator Bernard has to say.
While Jackson was a phenomenal speaker and a leader of the economic left in his own right, I would still say Bernie Sanders has been the most effective politician for the ideological transformation within the party you are describing here. Look at what he’s doing to Gavin Newsom by holding taxing billionaires rallies in LA, delivering Newsom headlines like “Bernie comes to LA to support health care, while Newsom, billionaires and crypto scramble to stop him”. Bernie seems unusually disciplined in sticking to his core issues of taxation and avoids getting bogged down by unrelated controversies the way Jackson did. I was listening to Patrick Gaspard on a pod recently and he was describing how Bernie is very invested and strategic about all this, he made mamdani add more class warfare elements to his inaugural speech, which mamdani had initially intended to keep more conciliatory. And how he’s been hectoring mamdani to use more cautious language around immigration, only for Gaspard to tell Bernie it doesn’t matter he can’t be president let him say what he wants it’s okay in NYC.
Bernie has obviously been important over the past 10 years, but I think you're underestimating just how long Jackson was in that role. From 1984 to 2016, Jackson was the most important leader in the progressive wing of the party.
I’m talking specifically about enforcing litmus tests and trying to purge the party of non-ideologues. Bernie and Warren, to a lesser extent with her personnel is policy, caused the party to go from an interest group brokerage party to an increasingly ideological party with deep convictions and a worldview.
I read the piece as making the point that Jackson wanted the party to go in that direction, I’m making the claim that Bernie was much more important in actually effectuating that change! I’m not claiming that Jackson wasn’t important in delivering anti-poverty programs or what he was fighting for at the time, but he very much didn’t succeed in changing the inner dynamics of the Democratic Party, he advanced his issues within the brokerage type party. Bernie has been much more successful in changing the compositional structure of what Dem party stands for, even while Bernie hasn’t actually passed any meaningful legislation through.
The Democrats very obviously changed more along these lines from 1984 to 2014 than from 2014 to 2024. And I say this as someone who was a fan of Bernie in the 90s!
Where do Never Trump conservatives fit into this "quilt" of a Democratic party?
From my perspective, the whole progressive coalition is a liability; the Democrats' advantage is that they're the last bastion of the decency and constitutionalist patriotism that I used to take for granted as an inherent and permanent trait of the American people.
How do you make the Democratic Party more welcoming to Reaganauts?
The fact is that it's not going to happen, and it probably shouldn't. Speaking as the kind of person that I think you mean (more a Rockefeller Republican actually, but I voted for Reagan twice and am still proud of it), the Democrats have the right to their own coalition and to exclude us, and we have the right not to join. We're allies in the effort to preserve liberal democracy, to end the current kleptocracy/kakistocracy, and to make sure that it can't return. I value and respect them for that, but I don't delude myself that we're ideological soulmates.
It's up to us to form the new Second Party, a Center-Right, Constitutionalist party dedicated to free thought, free people, free nations, and free markets, as the Conscience Whigs and the Anti-Slavery Democrats formed the Republican Party 170 years ago when the Whigs became as irredeemably corrupt as the Republicans are now. It's my ongoing frustration that the people who should be leading this, like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, seem to be afraid to put in the kind of hard work that Lincoln, Frémont, and Seward stepped up to do then.
What your comment makes me think of is that there might be common ground in favor of electoral reforms in the direction of proportional representation. Third parties in the US have always been pretty futile because of our electoral system. Open primaries and ranked choice voting... What are the options here?
It would be fun if Matt wrote a post about how Democrats can integrate Never Trump conservatives to grow their support base and win. :)
I agree about third parties, and I'm not talking about one. I'm talking about a new SECOND Party (PoliSci talk for the consecutive US Party Systems, in which the Democrats have been the "First Party" since Jefferson, competing with a series of rising and falling "Second Parties", the Republicans being the most recent) to REPLACE the Republicans, the way that they replaced the Whigs and the Whigs replaced the Federalists.
I live in Brazil these days, which has around 30 parties and proportional representation for every legislative body except the Federal Senate, and I would caution against proportional representation schemes. Whatever else they do, the break the line of responsibility -- and responsiveness -- between a specific legislator and his/her specific voters. And when legislators don't feel a need to respond to voters, they're going to respond to someone else, who's probably hard to identify.
Statistically, Never Trump conservatives are a trivially small percentage of the population that needs to get used to the fact that they are a trivially small percentage of the population that neither party feels, or should feel, any obligation to cater to.
After 2024, they can claim to have some level of moral persuasive power, but they cannot any longer stake any claim to electoral relevance. The Democratic Party will not become more welcoming to Reaganauts, it shouldn't, and if it did it would lose votes, not gain them.
Got polls to support that? It's prima facie implausible, and the fact that Democrats have struggled to regain popularity despite Trump's severe unpopularity doesn't favor it. It sounds like wishful thinking.
I saw Jackson speak at a get out the vote rally in 1996, at Bates College. He was supporting the Democratic candidates then in the middle of the Clinton era, including the then Mayor of Lewiston, a middle class black business owner who was not particularly progressive, although he was my former karate teacher. But he also reprised many of the lines from his 1988 convention speech. Thinking back on it now, it was a clear demonstration of what Matt is saying -- he maintained his principles and his goals, he recognized both that he was succeeded in taking the party in that direction and that his goals were best served by supporting candidates much more moderate than he was.
But at the time, it was just the best speech I had ever been to. And it still is.
I don't think you mention at any point during this post that you're doing it because Jessie Jackson just died. I mean, probably most people heard but in this fractured news environment maybe someone didn't. And as an archive read a year from now or something, it might help to have added a sentence near the beginning "in light of Jessie Jackson's recent death" or something.
The modern Democratic Party may very well have realized Jesse Jackson’s coalition building vision that peaked with Obama’s 2008 win but ideologically it’s an incoherent mess because of identity politics and focus on the bottom 15-20% instead of the middle class. No matter how many times Bernie lies about 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, less than 15% can be considered as poor and even they have access to many benefits. Most Americans do not want big changes in policy. Whichever party realizes that first and focuses on narrow and tangible things to improve on will expand their coalition.
Political speeches really were better back in the day, weren't they? I'd trade a fair amount of 2026's by-historical-standards limitless abundance for a higher bar on oratory. It's somewhat difficult to take the idea of Professional Politics ("Like a good neighbor, Statecraft is there") seriously when the soapbox floor is now open to very fine wackos on both sides. This too is something antisocial media ruined: a modern speech isn't good on its own merits, it's good if the pull quotes and soundbites vibe correctly. But then again, perhaps the polis does not have ears to hear anymore, so one can't fault them for not listening. The pitfall of committing to the symmetrical weapon of ideology is that it's much harder now to sway allegiences with beautiful words; therefore, beautiful words have no value. Zohran possibly being the rule-proving exception, maybe, TBD.
Leftism lost my interest when it drifted from material concerns in the world of atoms to critically theoretical concerns in the world of ideas. Perhaps it was a necessary trade to counter conservatism (forgive my ignorance if this is in fact well-established political history, the post simply assumes it). But I think we are still collectively poorer as a result of ending up in this [D, D] equilibrium. Contra Nader, I think I'd prefer a world where Democrats and Republicans actually literally were basically the same party.
“There was the foundation of National Review in 1955 with the explicit thesis that free market Republicans should make common cause with Dixiecrats to forge a conservative movement. There was Barry Goldwater’s victory in the 1964 Republican Party primary as an exponent of that strategy.”
This is a historical error you keep repeating. The conservative movement was first founded in 1955 on the basis of “fusionism” (anti-communists + libertarians/free-marketers + traditionalists) - there was no explicit common cause with Dixiecrats until after 1964 and the full evolution of factional change from Democrats to Republicans took another 30 years.
That level of poverty described in the 1988 speech (which was describing Jackson’s own childhood in the 50s) has become less salient because it just doesn’t really exist in the US today—people do not have outhouses for bathrooms or lack running water or unable to afford socks even in the poorest inner-city areas.
On some level it’s all relative and abundance is just the flip side of the coin. But it does seem to be the death knell for traditional social democratic economics-focused leftism when poverty of the type described by Jackson no longer exists in the first world. Maybe if we had a world government we could revive that type of leftism by focusing on this kind of poverty that does still exist in the third world.
Clearly, I go different places and know different people than you know. That kind of poverty still exists. People who live in camper shells. Or tents on vacant lots. Or worse than that.
I took the above comment to mean that it doesn’t exist nearly at the levels that it used to or at the levels we see in many developing countries.
A look at the supplemental poverty rate in the US bears that out. And it’s worth celebrating/ acknowledging when you’re crafting a policy agenda.
Not when that agenda is grift and siphoning off public funds for non-profits.
West coast municipal governance for th... wait, what "governance"?
Yes, there are a small number of homeless encampments but those problems usually aren’t strictly financial and even they have much better access to healthcare than they used to.
I grew up in a zip code with under half the median US income and am kind of traumatized from that, but most of the trauma was not getting toys I wanted and social stuff like going to crappy public schools with violence and uncaring bureaucracy and not fitting in when I later went to college; I did not know anyone to lack indoor plumbing or running water.
I'm talking about the people who live in crap substandard housing. Come take a tour of Commerce City, Colorado, with me. The women who live in what are basically shacks, and put out requests on Facebook for laundry detergent because their kid needs clean clothes for school. I've driven over with laundry detergent and quarters; I've seen that world.
I'm tooling around the areas closest to major petrochemical and industrial facilities now and it would seem to prove the point: they're 1950's houses with municipal sewer hookups, a car in the driveway, and bikes on the front lawn.
This is not the form "poverty" took when "poverty" was the basis for a working-to-middle-class coalition that could dominate politics.
You gotta pay the water bill and sewer bill, though. One woman I was driving to the doctor had all her...sewage...in big black trash bags beside the house. The smell, my God. The flies. Some of the windows were broken and covered with cardboard. She'd inherited the house from her grandmother. It was disintegrating around her.
Again, though. Not going to be the basis for mass politics.
I'm center-left and in favor of basically every universal and means-tested benefit we have and a few more, but if you want me to genuinely sympathize with the folks you describe, it's going to be hard. Because I too have volunteered and spent a lot of time with people like them, and have found that basically every sinew of agency they have is turned towards the end of making their lives worse.
I support existing social programs, not for the sake of the long-term poor, but for the sake of the transient poor who will, if given a hand, through their own efforts make their way out of poverty within a couple years.
As regards long-term poverty, the best we can do is to build the school system into something that can more ably substitute for a parent and try to rescue as many of their children as possible.
Girding poverty is less common, though—far less common—than in the 1940s and 1950s (the era Jackson was talking about). That's something to be glad about. And overall poverty was roughly cut in half just between 1980 and 2020, never mind what it was back in 1950.
https://jabberwocking.com/helping-the-poor-has-been-one-of-the-great-triumphs-of-the-progressive-movement/#:
We haven't eradicated poverty, sadly, but we have made it less common, and less severe from a material standpoint (though I doubt it's less painful psychologically).
Sometimes I wonder if the people doing the census and the poverty counts are really finding everyone, though.
Things have improved. I won't deny that. But we affluent Slow Borer types can be kind of dismissive about the people who remain in very bad circumstances.
The long-term homelessness necessary to experience these conditions describes approximately 10-15,000 people in the whole country. In 1950, it described something like 35% of the housing stock. It wasn't until 1970 that only a single-digit percentage of the country's housing lacked *any* indoor plumbing, and until 1990 that only a percent or two lacked full indoor plumbing with sewerage.
It is not, cannot, will never, be the basis for a mass politics.
Normies differentiate between working poor and junkie poor.
Lots of people in the 1960s thought the people in Appalachia were the undeserving poor.
I’m telling you what the normie view is. Deserving or undeserving is a personal opinion.
I know, but I'm pointing out that many normies in the 50s and 60s felt the same way.
That is a gross insult to the working poor who live in extreme poverty, for example many of the homeless. Or are too disabled to work. The mentally ill through no fault of their own. Open your eyes and ears. Engage and aid the homeless.
They won’t be homeless if they were forcibly committed. Their own families don’t want to help them. That should tell you something.
Your comment gives the impression that you assume that those who are mentally ill and in dire poverty, even homeless, are that way through their own fault. Yes, some can't live with family because their illness makes them violent, for example bipolar disorder. But that isn't their fault. It's genetic and they got snake eyes at the gamble of conception. Some don't live with their family because they suffer paranoid delusions against family members. That's usually due to a genetic-based illness. Some families have broken up, each going their own way, none of them with resources to be caretakers -- not the fault of the homeless poor. Some families are selfish and cruel. Some families are criminals.
This sounds like a case *for* mandatory institutional treatment, not against.
There is a homeless guy in our town who has tried about 60 times to start brush fires on the hillsides above downtown. The judges keep letting him go because it's not his fault he's bipolar or schizophrenic and there are no (enforced) laws saying he needs to be institutionalized and there are no institutions to send him too. One of these days he may succeed on burning down the town.
He's trolling. DFTT sounds so "2011" but sometimes it's worth saying.
Thank you. I was going to start sputtering about the people I've volunteered with.
You're right, but *politically* the dimensions are very different. It used to be that grinding poverty and the working class went hand-in-hand, some people would be better off than others and have running water or might have an easier time hosting a proper Thanksgiving, but the vast bulk of the working class (even if a bit richer than Jackson describes in his quote) felt extremely precarious and felt real material hardship. It was a self-interested politics of uplifting this broad base of millions of people who could be the core of a voting bloc.
Now, anti-poverty politics is something that is mostly about the compassion of middle class people. Working class voters themselves are not particularly keen on it, largely because they largely have what middle class people would consider extremely reactionary opinions on the very poor, notably that it's mostly their own fault and they don't want to see anyone surviving on welfare when they have to work very hard to provide a (comfortable, but modest) life for their family.
You are talking about a very small number of people in a very large and populous country. Jackson was describing whole neighborhoods common in every town, city, and rural area.
My cousins, boomers, grew up with nothing but an outhouse until the late 1960s, and they were not the poorest people they or I knew.
WIC, food stamps, AFDC, EITC, school lunches, etc., and just the general level of prosperity have driven this kind of poverty down to rates unseen in our or anyone else's history.
In all these cases, people have access to running water and a bathroom; it’s just not exclusively theirs. That’s just qualitatively different from the situation in the 50’s, when whole communities lived like this.
There is still quite a bit of extreme poverty in the US. This is especially evident in homelessness data. The exact figures vary a lot by the source and how you define “homeless”, but there are somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of homeless children.
To your point, these numbers aren’t high enough to drive a mass political movement, but it’s not like we solved poverty either.
Personally, I would much rather live in a house with a slop bucket and no running water than sleep in a shelter ever night. Or not know where my kids will sleep next week.
The extreme poverty the US has left seems to be a downstream affect of disability, mental illness and/or drug addiction. The solutions to reducing current extreme poverty are very different than 70 years ago.
Not the point of your comment, but I know two people around 25-35 years old who grew up in Alaska in middle-class homes with outhouses. They’re apparently common enough if the soil is too unworkable for septic systems.
I feel like a compost toilet and a proper disposal pit are the play there, with an outhouse as a backup. Would much rather bundle up to spend ten minutes emptying the toilet once every few days than fumble my way outside to the bathroom at 6:30 AM.
What does one do with gray water in this situation? Just pump it to an outlet away from and downhill from the house?
Objectively true but I took Matt to mean not a coherent economic message for the 21st century. Sanders attempted to frame the debate between the 99% vs the 1% but clearly hasn’t resonated. Affordability has taken center stage. I don’t think either party has real solutions, and the Dems have long been poor at articulating their message.
I was an adult throughout this period. You fail to mention how the wind was taken out of Jesse Jackson's sails when his organization, Operation PUSH, was rocked with financial mismanagement, scandal and blatant self dealing (shades of Trump). His failure to run his own house efficiently and honestly doomed him to play a far lesser role than he could have.
If only financial mismanagement and self dealing were still fatal to a career in politics…
So true. Ah, the old days.
The 70s movements outlined spectacularly well in Burrough's 'Days of Rage' are almost a mirror image of what is happening with their descendent ideologues today. As you say the post-Vietnam movements of the 70s collapsed under the weight of their own incompetence, and it seems that though learning nothing those ideological children are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
“…scandal and blatant self dealing…”
There’s also the assassination of MLK: Jackson claimed to have been next to King when he was shot, and later appeared on camera, with blood on his shirt, claiming to have cradled King in his arms as he lay dying. Eyewitnesses reported instead that Jackson was not on the balcony when King was shot, and that he later smeared blood on his shirt by dipping his hands in the pool remaining after King’s body ws removed.
Jackson was a grubby little grifter from the start.
Many were. Marion Barry was also a big mover in the Civil Rights era and was a total grifter pol.
He leaves a victorious economic legacy -- investments in poverty reduction have grown 10x since the 70s, adjusted welfare benefits exploding from $7500(ish) to $64k for the bottom quintile over that time, fueled by property taxes (60%+ higher) and local taxes (8%>13% of all output) today. The poverty rate commensurately plummeted to 10%ish today in official metrics, but looking at consumption metrics it fell from nearly 33% to 6% today.
As Matt says this is basically unacknowledged by the left and the other side of the coin is the "victorious" social legacy of "intersectionality" he also leaves. The oppressor/oppressed frame today is almost word-for-word unchanged despite those huge gains in economic progressive success.
The economic reality does not match the messaging anymore, but the anti semitic slurs and vitriolic nature of the leftist social politics remains. It cannot last, imo. Without a legitimate economic message to couple the social frame the movement lacks internal coherence. Doordash just reported it's largest jump in orders ever. We can thank Jackson for his work while also recognizing that perhaps it is time for a new movement in democratic politics.
Dylan Matthews has a blog post about how he tried to pitch a book about this fact and highlight the people that were integral to making it happen, but it went nowhere
https://open.substack.com/pub/dylanmatthews/p/so-its-come-to-this-a-dylan-matthews?r=1cj74&utm_medium=ios
On so many fronts, I feel like the left is describing a country from 30 years ago rather than the one I see around me. Thanks for sharing this post.
It's like some kind of insatiable guilt that afflicts the far left and they need something to feed that fire. Compassion is a wonderful thing and a major step in our personal evolution but even that can be overdone (the Buddhists call it idiot compassion).
He should self publish I'd love to read it
I agree that there have been massive economic improvements but I don’t think that’s unacknowledged by the left—most of the 50s nostalgia is coming from the right while most on the left seem to agree that the 50s were a crappy time for poor people and that only rich white men had a good time of it then (even as sometimes they are nostalgic for the high tax rates).
Economic improvements also don’t negate the social issues or inequality or the oppressed/oppressor frame (which is usually applied to situations where the oppressed party is genuinely poor and at the mercy of the oppressing party’s superior capacity to do organized violence).
I see no evidence of acknowledgement of economic improvement due to drastic increase in taxation on the left. Quite the opposite -- leftist mayors and governors around the country are chalking up current failures of democratic governance to revenue failures alone.
On the social front, in America today, can you argue with a straight face that it is the 'oppressor class' performing organized violence?
Hey, I think you’re on to something. You know what, I think we should ask our good friends Alex Pretti and Renee Good to give their thoughts about the oppressor class engaging in performing organized violence. Wait, what’s that? They were both murdered by armed agents or the state? And the agents involved have suffered basically zero real consequences for their actions? And their leaders went out smeared the victims with easily disprovable lies?
If you want to make the argument that far left types invoke the “oppressor/oppressed” dynamic way too often as some catch all for every problem in the world? Fine, I have time for that argument. But for you to write the statement you wrote in your last paragraph was an absolute “are you fucking kidding me?!l moment from me. These murders just happened. Do you have the memory of a goldfish?!!
I was waiting for this comment, and it's exactly the sort of frame I think is misguided and wrong.
In the 60s and 70s, the FBI targeted American civil rights leaders, famously wiretapping MLK jr to blackmail him and other civil rights leaders under COINTELPRO. War on Drugs over reach, mass arrests in Birmingham, urban militarization, etc.
Today, far-leftist like you have decided that increases in completely normal immigration enforcement, voted into power in response to Dem leadership abdication of border responsibilities in the prior admin, is seen as de-facto illegitimate and oppressive.
Its awful what happened to Pretti and Good, but bringing an unlicensed gun or ramming a car to interfere with legitimate law enforcement action and having tragedy occur in the commotion that follows is not the same thing at all. It would never have occurred had local law enforcement been able to work with ICE but was prevented under Sanctuary City legislation.
Paradoxically now we have urban white progressives yelling slurs and interfering with overwhelmingly more racially mixed ICE officers while claiming the mantle of the oppressed. I find both sides of the current ICE debate disgusting, and in no way can leftists legitimately claim that this conflict exists within an oppressor/oppressed framework.
"It would never have occurred had local law enforcement been able to work with ICE but was prevented under Sanctuary City legislation."
I'm sorry this is bananas. ICE officers were driven to execute Alex Pretti because months/years earlier, therefore ICE officers were what driven to execute an American citizen? This some real "Murc's law" stuff taken to it's logical endpoint. You realize this is the same logic far leftist people give for rioting in 2020 right? "The people were driven to destroy small businesses because of systematic racism".
Hate to break it to you buddy but the COINTELPRO stuff is happening right now. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-social-media.html. Key pull out quote "The Trump administration has aggressively tried tamping down criticism of ICE, partly by identifying Americans who have demonstrated against the agency. ICE agents told protesters in Minneapolis and Chicago that they were being recorded and identified with facial recognition technology." Again, literally on Monday we had a glaring example of the state making it clear they'll step in to try to stop "speech" they don't like from getting aired.
And sorry the racially mixed ICE is not the "gotchya" you think it is. Collaborators with the state has been a thing for a very long time. Remember this story in Memphis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tyre_Nichols
And as for this "Today, far-leftist like you have decided that increases in completely normal immigration enforcement" Yeah hate to break it to you but only the hardcore base is onboard with the extreme measures taken by ICE. https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-february-2026/ . But to be frank the fact you think that I must be a "far leftist" is kind of all I really need to know where you're coming from. I would really ask you go ahead and look what MattY wrote https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-turning-point-in-minnesota. Seriously, read the whole thing and if you're conclusion is Matt is making a "far leftist" argument I really really don't know what to tell you.
The only way to support the Trump administrations rejection of American values like due process, habeas corpus, free speech, the right to bear arms, etc is to be anti-American.
The whole “you cannot treat these violations of rights and law as illegitimate” is dishonest and circular. It’s basically “you cannot criticize the violation of law because those violating the law are THE LAW.”
I'm not going to wade into this debate other than to say that, knowing Colin's posting history, calling him a "far leftist" is absurd.
I felt that too.
You are wrong to frame this as “normal.” Especially since the most effective use of resources would target employers and not random people on the street as a performative action in specific Democratic cities.
You can argue the ‘Kavanaugh Stops’ and at-large raids are retaliatory and not as effective as they could be, but you cannot argue that it's illegitimate oppressors cracking down extra-judicially on an oppressed class of Americans.
The fact that you feel a need to flagrantly lie about the most basic facts of the Good and Pretti shootings (Good did not "ram a car," Pretti's handgun was licensed) in an effort to smear the victims (not to mention idiotically speculate about what would have happened if police departments turned their staff over to ICE to act as additional attack dogs) says all we need to know about this position.
>abdication of border responsibilities in the prior admin
I am really tired of this take. When a ton of people show up at the border claiming asylum, the options are:
1. Saying no.
2. Sending them to deportation proceedings but telling them to stay in Mexico until their immigration court hearing
3. Sending them to deportation proceedings and Imprisoning them in the US until their immigration court hearing
4. Sending them to deportation proceedings and letting them live in the US until their immigration court hearing
Given the costs of options 1-3 (costs to the migrants in 1 and 2, and costs to both the migrants and government of #3), choosing #4 is perfectly reasonable as the best of several bad options, and it is nowhere close to "abdication of border responsibilities"
The US government has responsibilities towards it’s citizens, not migrants or other governments. So, yes, abdication of border responsibilities seems accurate, especially when reverting to Trump’s policies in year 4 wasn’t much of a problem.
This misses the scale of the problem -- https://share.google/bU7QSIvvsedEUavg1
(1) was clearly the best option after it started to get bad, but that didn't happen. (4) is what happened but it leads to the huge necessity in increased ICE enforcement we are seeing now as a backlash to that policy. It seems to me that if you accept (4) then you must accept aggressive deportation actions when 7% of the nation of Nicaragua (et al) were not found to be legitimate asylum seekers.
Spending billions to accommodate (4) and then spending hundreds of millions to enforce the rejected claims has imo been an abdication of basic responsibility.
ICE has clearly overreached, which is why the Trump administration decided to back down, but deporting illegal immigrants is not oppression, even if you want to argue that Obama and Clinton were oppressors.
Warrantless searches of what turn out to be citizen households with children held at gunpoint, routine brutality against any civilian nearby, use of force practices that would have made the Soviets in Czechoslovakia in 1968 blush, deliberately declining to accept evidence of citizenship and holding or deporting native-born and naturalized Americans... get back to me when you want to claim that forcibly quartering ICE in local households isn't oppressive, lol.
IDGAF about deporting people with deportation orders in public places or executing judicial warrants for access to private ones, but that's not what's been happening.
Which part of “ICE has clearly overreached” was not clear to you?
Don't the kids in social medias res say that Doordash is cheaper than cooking, because groceries cost too much these days? Seems like there's still an appetite for outdated economic messaging in this economy.
They also tried to eat tide pods because TikTok told them too.
I wonder if that thinking is a reason for higher rates of colon cancer in young people these days.
Ironically the anti-poverty push coincided with urban disintegration, disorder and the explosion in the drug trade.
I suspect that with civil rights you have greater sorting of people based on ability and culture. High ability people experience new opportunities to move and remove themselves from areas where bad cultures (a perverse form of Southern honor culture) result in violence and dysfunction.
With the FHA the African American middle class leaves from dysfunctional cities (that were facing fiscal crunches in the 60s and 70s for broader structural issues.) This concentrates dysfunction and bad cultural patterns. Those problems result in the rise of narcotics use and trade. Poverty relief programs exacerbate this only inasmuch as it contributed to the midcentury sorting.
In short, it’s an unintentional market for lemons. This is my hypothesis for why many U.S. cities have crime and dysfunction.
This is an excellent point. Reading about Jesse Jackson's mother, it's obvious she was a more functional person than myself or probably most of the posters here, and it's inconceivable that someone with as much agency as her would be eating turkey carcass on Thanksgiving in 2026.
There’s a lot of whitewashing of some fairly vicious antisemitism, with no counterpart anti black racism, that goes into these anodyne recaps of the black-Jewish relationship - such as the NYT article Matt is cribbing from. The Crown Heights Riot, for example, was very much a unilateral affair. Ah well, I guess I can look forward to explaining to my kids that no, the reason Jews weren’t involved in the Women’s March wasn’t “disagreements about the Palestinians”, and that Tamika Mallory’s relationship with Farrakhan wasn’t some cute sidenote.
On the flip side, Norm Finkelstein referred to Van Jones using uncle Tom and the Yiddish equivalent of the N-word. I found it deeply shocking how little pushback he got for that. He hasn't felt a need to delete the comments. It seems a community that could scarcely proclaim any louder the importance of anti-racism will shrug at people using racial slurs so long as it's in the service of anti-Zionism.
https://x.com/normfinkelstein/status/1975603277690536163
https://x.com/normfinkelstein/status/1975672998439878908
Number 1 is clearly imputing tokenism to TFP
I think MY may be right that a lot of Jackson's vision won out, despite the Clintonian interlude that Obama mostly followed in substance.
I'm not really sure that's a good thing though, not when there aren't enough squares, and where they aren't distributed well for Senate and Electoral College purposes. In terms of big picture I think it's also always interesting how Democrats back in the day took for granted having the working class. You can add 'white' to that if you need to but even though they've been the first to depart the coalition it's under threat across races, and in particular with men.
My take is that the quilt is a lovely metaphor for the political world Jackson inhabited, or at least a plausible enough perspective of it, particularly pre-90s, but it isn't good politics anymore. In the 2020s it's just grievance groups with claims of dubious merit looking for satisfaction against a unified majority that no longer exists. I've said before we need someone with a vision, and part of that vision is going to have to be very deliberately leaving Jackson in the past.
I really strongly disagree that Obama was 'Clintonian' as opposed to closer to the anti-poverty intersectional coalition mold. the ACA burned absolutely enormous amounts of political capital all to help poor people pay for healthcare, and the Obama admin was pretty famous for handing out social issue wins to every constituent 'oppressed' group in the coalition.
It’s striking that Jackson’s death comes just as Mamdani has emerged as a clear standard-bearer for the left. I was a little surprised at how personally affectionate Bernie was when talking about Zohran on Stephen Colbert’s show. Bernie usually frames praise around someone’s grasp of the issues, so hearing him excitedly talk about how much he “loves” Mamdani as a person and what “he loves about him” felt strange.
My read is that Bernie genuinely sees him as competent, disciplined, and movement-ready, someone capable of carrying the project forward. Whether intentional or not, it felt like an early passing of the torch, something that will likely become even clearer upon Bernie’s eventual retirement/passing.
If that’s happening on the left, moderates should be thinking just as seriously about cultivating new blood and leadership rather than defaulting to Newsom or even Whitmer/Shapiro as the best they’ve got. Obama has been out of office for years, and the search for a compelling and inspiring liberal/moderate standard bearer still feels unresolved.
If people like Shapiro and Beshear are able to win in purple and red states and govern effectively, one of them should be able to translate that success by raising their game during a Presidential run. You can’t keep banking on the emergence of a generational talent like Obama to save your party.
FWIW it seems like for the last couple of generations generational talents are the ones who win the White House - Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump. The non-generational talents were all former VPs or the son of a former president.
Clinton and Reagan also had governing experience, unlike Obama or Trump. So, i’m hesitant to attribute their wins purely to political talent. They went through the grind and got political experience.
Seems underwhelming but you might be right
Even Pritzker seems to have gotten serious since the voters rejected an attempt to end the state's uniformity clause and allow progressive taxation.
The current YIMBY bill he backs, forcing CTA and Metra to undertake reforms and the region to rezone high-transit areas before the state would renew and expand funding, some discussion of *gasps* pension reform...
He's acting like someone who has seen the light on the need to unfuck IL.
Shapiro has done great things on state capacity and public-sector accountability, he's improved the allocation of state funds to local school systems, he's started to beat on PennDOT's worst failings, he's backed some moderate YIMBY moves as he can, he's worked to lower regulatory burdens for business and reduce our corporate tax rate, but at the end of the day he's presiding over divided government in which the GOP desperately wants to tear the heart out of the state's major economic engines no matter how much it harms their own voters, so his ability to enact reforms is limited.
I think Bernie's just more sentimental as he approaches his (inevitable) death. He also took to referring to AOC as "my daughter Alexandria" on a few occasions, which is something you only say about someone for whom you have the deepest kind of affection (and in a very literal sense declares her as his heir)
Yeah. Dude's old as shit. He may just be talking because his lips are flapping. I was never part of the movement, but now more than ever I don't give much of a hoot what the should-be-retired Senator Bernard has to say.
I feel old.
I feel naive
While Jackson was a phenomenal speaker and a leader of the economic left in his own right, I would still say Bernie Sanders has been the most effective politician for the ideological transformation within the party you are describing here. Look at what he’s doing to Gavin Newsom by holding taxing billionaires rallies in LA, delivering Newsom headlines like “Bernie comes to LA to support health care, while Newsom, billionaires and crypto scramble to stop him”. Bernie seems unusually disciplined in sticking to his core issues of taxation and avoids getting bogged down by unrelated controversies the way Jackson did. I was listening to Patrick Gaspard on a pod recently and he was describing how Bernie is very invested and strategic about all this, he made mamdani add more class warfare elements to his inaugural speech, which mamdani had initially intended to keep more conciliatory. And how he’s been hectoring mamdani to use more cautious language around immigration, only for Gaspard to tell Bernie it doesn’t matter he can’t be president let him say what he wants it’s okay in NYC.
Bernie has obviously been important over the past 10 years, but I think you're underestimating just how long Jackson was in that role. From 1984 to 2016, Jackson was the most important leader in the progressive wing of the party.
I’m talking specifically about enforcing litmus tests and trying to purge the party of non-ideologues. Bernie and Warren, to a lesser extent with her personnel is policy, caused the party to go from an interest group brokerage party to an increasingly ideological party with deep convictions and a worldview.
The whole point of Matt's column is about how Jackson led the transformation of the party into a more unified and ideological one.
I read the piece as making the point that Jackson wanted the party to go in that direction, I’m making the claim that Bernie was much more important in actually effectuating that change! I’m not claiming that Jackson wasn’t important in delivering anti-poverty programs or what he was fighting for at the time, but he very much didn’t succeed in changing the inner dynamics of the Democratic Party, he advanced his issues within the brokerage type party. Bernie has been much more successful in changing the compositional structure of what Dem party stands for, even while Bernie hasn’t actually passed any meaningful legislation through.
The Democrats very obviously changed more along these lines from 1984 to 2014 than from 2014 to 2024. And I say this as someone who was a fan of Bernie in the 90s!
Eh, I think he was pretty marginal once the Rainbow coalition got into scandal and his personal scandals really manifested.
Can you elaborate?
Where do Never Trump conservatives fit into this "quilt" of a Democratic party?
From my perspective, the whole progressive coalition is a liability; the Democrats' advantage is that they're the last bastion of the decency and constitutionalist patriotism that I used to take for granted as an inherent and permanent trait of the American people.
How do you make the Democratic Party more welcoming to Reaganauts?
The fact is that it's not going to happen, and it probably shouldn't. Speaking as the kind of person that I think you mean (more a Rockefeller Republican actually, but I voted for Reagan twice and am still proud of it), the Democrats have the right to their own coalition and to exclude us, and we have the right not to join. We're allies in the effort to preserve liberal democracy, to end the current kleptocracy/kakistocracy, and to make sure that it can't return. I value and respect them for that, but I don't delude myself that we're ideological soulmates.
It's up to us to form the new Second Party, a Center-Right, Constitutionalist party dedicated to free thought, free people, free nations, and free markets, as the Conscience Whigs and the Anti-Slavery Democrats formed the Republican Party 170 years ago when the Whigs became as irredeemably corrupt as the Republicans are now. It's my ongoing frustration that the people who should be leading this, like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, seem to be afraid to put in the kind of hard work that Lincoln, Frémont, and Seward stepped up to do then.
What your comment makes me think of is that there might be common ground in favor of electoral reforms in the direction of proportional representation. Third parties in the US have always been pretty futile because of our electoral system. Open primaries and ranked choice voting... What are the options here?
It would be fun if Matt wrote a post about how Democrats can integrate Never Trump conservatives to grow their support base and win. :)
I agree about third parties, and I'm not talking about one. I'm talking about a new SECOND Party (PoliSci talk for the consecutive US Party Systems, in which the Democrats have been the "First Party" since Jefferson, competing with a series of rising and falling "Second Parties", the Republicans being the most recent) to REPLACE the Republicans, the way that they replaced the Whigs and the Whigs replaced the Federalists.
I live in Brazil these days, which has around 30 parties and proportional representation for every legislative body except the Federal Senate, and I would caution against proportional representation schemes. Whatever else they do, the break the line of responsibility -- and responsiveness -- between a specific legislator and his/her specific voters. And when legislators don't feel a need to respond to voters, they're going to respond to someone else, who's probably hard to identify.
Statistically, Never Trump conservatives are a trivially small percentage of the population that needs to get used to the fact that they are a trivially small percentage of the population that neither party feels, or should feel, any obligation to cater to.
After 2024, they can claim to have some level of moral persuasive power, but they cannot any longer stake any claim to electoral relevance. The Democratic Party will not become more welcoming to Reaganauts, it shouldn't, and if it did it would lose votes, not gain them.
Got polls to support that? It's prima facie implausible, and the fact that Democrats have struggled to regain popularity despite Trump's severe unpopularity doesn't favor it. It sounds like wishful thinking.
I saw Jackson speak at a get out the vote rally in 1996, at Bates College. He was supporting the Democratic candidates then in the middle of the Clinton era, including the then Mayor of Lewiston, a middle class black business owner who was not particularly progressive, although he was my former karate teacher. But he also reprised many of the lines from his 1988 convention speech. Thinking back on it now, it was a clear demonstration of what Matt is saying -- he maintained his principles and his goals, he recognized both that he was succeeded in taking the party in that direction and that his goals were best served by supporting candidates much more moderate than he was.
But at the time, it was just the best speech I had ever been to. And it still is.
The keep hope alive speech was the first time I saw how political oratory would move me. I was 11 and I still remember.
Oh, man, "Hymie Town," I remember that. Yeah, that wasn't a good look.
I don't think you mention at any point during this post that you're doing it because Jessie Jackson just died. I mean, probably most people heard but in this fractured news environment maybe someone didn't. And as an archive read a year from now or something, it might help to have added a sentence near the beginning "in light of Jessie Jackson's recent death" or something.
The modern Democratic Party may very well have realized Jesse Jackson’s coalition building vision that peaked with Obama’s 2008 win but ideologically it’s an incoherent mess because of identity politics and focus on the bottom 15-20% instead of the middle class. No matter how many times Bernie lies about 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, less than 15% can be considered as poor and even they have access to many benefits. Most Americans do not want big changes in policy. Whichever party realizes that first and focuses on narrow and tangible things to improve on will expand their coalition.
Political speeches really were better back in the day, weren't they? I'd trade a fair amount of 2026's by-historical-standards limitless abundance for a higher bar on oratory. It's somewhat difficult to take the idea of Professional Politics ("Like a good neighbor, Statecraft is there") seriously when the soapbox floor is now open to very fine wackos on both sides. This too is something antisocial media ruined: a modern speech isn't good on its own merits, it's good if the pull quotes and soundbites vibe correctly. But then again, perhaps the polis does not have ears to hear anymore, so one can't fault them for not listening. The pitfall of committing to the symmetrical weapon of ideology is that it's much harder now to sway allegiences with beautiful words; therefore, beautiful words have no value. Zohran possibly being the rule-proving exception, maybe, TBD.
Leftism lost my interest when it drifted from material concerns in the world of atoms to critically theoretical concerns in the world of ideas. Perhaps it was a necessary trade to counter conservatism (forgive my ignorance if this is in fact well-established political history, the post simply assumes it). But I think we are still collectively poorer as a result of ending up in this [D, D] equilibrium. Contra Nader, I think I'd prefer a world where Democrats and Republicans actually literally were basically the same party.
“There was the foundation of National Review in 1955 with the explicit thesis that free market Republicans should make common cause with Dixiecrats to forge a conservative movement. There was Barry Goldwater’s victory in the 1964 Republican Party primary as an exponent of that strategy.”
This is a historical error you keep repeating. The conservative movement was first founded in 1955 on the basis of “fusionism” (anti-communists + libertarians/free-marketers + traditionalists) - there was no explicit common cause with Dixiecrats until after 1964 and the full evolution of factional change from Democrats to Republicans took another 30 years.
There was the notorious Buckley essay but he did eventually recant.