Jesse Jackson, who's campaign platform was similar to Bernie's, must have scared the hell out of them.


On Stone Mountain -White Supremacy and the Birth of the Modern Democratic Party

In 1983 Jesse Jackson announced his presidential platform in starkly multiracial terms:

This candidacy is not for blacks only. This is a national campaign growing out of the black experience and seen through the eyes of a black perspective—which is the experience and perspective of the rejected. Because of this experience, I can empathize with the plight of Appalachia because I have known poverty. I know the pain of anti-Semitism because I have felt the humiliation of discrimination. I know firsthand the shame of bread lines and the horror of hopelessness and despair.

Although Jackson lost the 1984 Democratic nomination to Walter Mondale, he managed to place third in the primary with more than 3 million votes. When Jackson ran again in 1988 he placed second, winning nearly 7 million votes and more than one thousand delegates—more than any runner-up in history, according to journalist JoAnn Wypijewski. Pulled between Reagan, Jackson, and an electorate that for five out of the previous six presidential election cycles had chosen a Republican, the Democratic Party was in crisis.To “solve” the Reagan-Jackson antinomy, centrist and conservative white Democrats from the South—led by political strategist Al From and including Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, Virginia Governor Chuck Robb, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and Tennessee Senator Al Gore—established the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in 1985 with the chief aim of “moving the party—both in substance and perception—back into the mainstream of political life.”

The DLC repudiated Franklin D. Roosevelt’s development of the social welfare state through New Deal initiatives and what it perceived to be Lyndon B. Johnson’s partiality to special interest groups. No longer was the Democratic Party interested in speaking to, and representing, its core constituency since the 1960s: people of color, labor, women, the working poor, and the unemployed. Instead, the DLC couched its campaign rhetoric and policy platforms in the language of “mainstream America” and “the forgotten middle class.” The DLC was determined to make the party more palatable to the white men—especially the Southern white men—the Democratic Party had lost to the GOP after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other political victories won by people of color. If Nixon’s Southern strategy opened the GOP’s door to alienated white voters by dog-whistling an embrace of white supremacy, the DLC’s aspiration to move the party into the mainstream of political life was an attempt to court those same voters.

Though the DLC was established in 1985, it didn’t become a significant force within the Democratic Party until after Jackson’s second-place primary finish in 1988. At a DLC conference in November 1989, Louisiana Senator John Breaux told attendees that the party needed to redirect itself “toward a mainstream agenda” because “working-class white Democrats have been deserting the Democratic primary process in droves.”

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