A week before the Super Tuesday Democratic primary in 1988, I spent a few days on the campaign trail with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who died last week at the age of eighty-four. Jackson was renowned for his soaring rhetoric, his role in the civil-rights movement, and his sharp elbows, but what first struck me about him, as a young reporter only a couple of years out of journalism school, was his boundless energy and self-assurance. His campaign couldn’t afford a big advertising budget. Instead, it rented a press plane, in which he dashed from state to state creating his own buzz. In a reporter’s notebook that I dug up, I wrote, “Jackson’s campaign is a chaotic charge. When the reporters (six at the end of last week, now closer to thirty) step into the DC9 at some unearthly hour of the morning, no-one knows where they will end up that day . . . Additional stops to the itinerary are dropped and added at will. The Reverend, as he is called by his aides, walks easily up and down the plane, swapping jokes with the press corps.”

Although Jackson had run a highly creditable third in the 1984 Democratic primary, behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart, some political commentators initially dismissed his 1988 run on the ground that he couldn’t break out of his Black voting base. After he posted second-place finishes in Minnesota and Maine, the pundits could no longer ignore him or his message, which, in a field largely made up of milquetoast centrists who seemed to be running scared from the drubbing that the liberal Mondale had received at the hands of Ronald Reagan, stood out as an unashamedly populist one.

Jackson advocated higher taxes on the rich. At a labor forum in Baltimore, he cited figures showing just how regressive Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts had been and declared, “He’s brought in reverse Robin Hood, taking from the poor and giving to the rich.” On the airport tarmac in his home state of South Carolina, which was losing textile jobs in large numbers, he criticized manufacturers for moving their operations overseas and called for policies to encourage companies “to invest in America, retrain our workers, reindustrialize America.” At a white-owned dairy farm outside of Greenville, he bemoaned the demise of family farms and shared a breakfast of eggs and grits with the farm’s owner and a neighbor. Although the farmers wouldn’t publicly commit to voting for their illustrious visitor, one of them said, “The American people like what he’s saying.”

In Black communities, Jackson consistently attracted big crowds, but even there he delivered a message that crossed racial lines. One of his stops was in Selma, Alabama, where, in 1965, state troopers and local police brutalized unarmed Black demonstrators. (It was this incident that prompted Jackson, then a seminary student in Chicago, to go to the South, where he joined other civil-rights activists and met Martin Luther King, Jr.) Speaking at a local school, he saluted those who took part in the Selma demonstration and the subsequent marches to Montgomery. Then he changed tack. “Twenty years ago, it was Black versus white,” he said. “Now it is the barracudas versus the small fish.” He went on, “Beyond social justice is the quest for economic justice and fairness. That is what the American people are looking for in this campaign. My campaign represents hope and fairness.”

In certain political circles, the rap on Jackson was that he was all talk. (In a 1990 magazine article, the Los Angeles Times quoted Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington, D.C., as saying, “Jesse don’t wanna run nothing but his mouth.”) But in 1988, Jackson’s oratory was backed up by an expansive policy platform, which called for hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for education, child care, housing, and infrastructure projects. The details included a national investment bank to back major development projects, a raise in the federal minimum wage, legislation to make it easier for labor unions to organize, an expansion of Medicaid, a proposal to mobilize capital from public pension funds to build low-income housing, and a national early-childhood-education program. Jackson was responding to rising concerns, among Americans of all races, about jobs, wages, affordability, and inequality—concerns that have now bedevilled the country for nearly forty years. “He was like a sponge: he took in everything,” Robert Borosage, a veteran progressive activist and author who served as Jackson’s issues director on the 1988 campaign, said when I called him up last week. “And he was very ambitious, and he wanted a very ambitious program.”

At a time when Reagan’s tax cuts had created a big budget deficit and raised fears of looming insolvency, critics claimed that Jackson’s platform was unaffordable and irresponsible. To counter these attacks, Borosage and a team of outside experts put together a budget proposal, which raised taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and froze the Pentagon budget for five years, enabling Jackson, at least in theory, to finance his programs and also cut the deficit. “It turned out that if you were prepared to cut military spending, if you were prepared to reverse the Reagan tax cuts for the rich, and do a few other things, you had a lot of money to spend,” Borosage recalled.

Like all budgets, Jackson’s depended on disputable economic assumptions, but the Washington Post’s editorial page, a different creature then than it is now, highlighted how it went beyond the level of detail that his rivals had provided and sought “to remind the Democratic Party of a set of obligations that have become unfashionable.” Ultimately, this reminder wasn’t sufficient to carry Jackson to the nomination, which went to Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts. But Jackson came in a strong second, garnering almost thirty per cent of the votes and more than a thousand delegates. At the Democratic National Convention, in Atlanta, he delivered a rousing speech in which he called for “common ground” and ended by repeating, to deafening cheers, his signature refrain: “Keep hope alive!”

Some of the obituaries published last week—including a fine one by Borosage, in The Nation—pointed out that Jackson’s 1988 campaign, by demonstrating that a Black candidate could gain large numbers of white voters and by forcing changes to the rules governing the Democratic primary, helped to pave the way for Barack Obama’s victory, twenty years later. That’s true, and it’s an important part of Jackson’s legacy. But his death also got me thinking about some different history—counterfactual history. What if Jackson—or another Democratic hewing to his populist line—had won the nomination, gone on to win the Presidency, and enacted the program that he campaigned on? How different would U.S. politics look today?

This exercise is clouded by the fact that, in 1992, another brand of economic populism played an important role in Bill Clinton’s successful Presidential bid. Politically, Clinton positioned himself as a centrist “New Democrat.” But he also promised to make the rich pay more taxes, raise the minimum wage, introduce universal health care, and protect the “forgotten middle class” that “plays by the rules” and “gets the shaft.” In office, the Clinton Administration did hike the top federal income-tax rate, from thirty-one per cent to 39.6 per cent. It also expanded the earned income-tax credit, which raised the spending power of many working families. But Clinton’s health-care reform foundered, his commitment to deficit reduction constrained the rest of his domestic agenda, and, in December, 1993, he signed NAFTA, which he had criticized during the 1992 campaign before eventually giving it a qualified endorsement. Thereafter, his Administration supported the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995 and granted China permanent normal trade relations in 2000. Globalization fostered global economic development, provided Americans with lots of cheap imported goods, and boosted some U.S. industries—over-all employment grew strongly in the nineteen-nineties—but it hollowed out parts of the manufacturing sector, and hit some sections of the country particularly hard, creating societal problems and political alienation.

At least in the world of counterfactuals, there is an alternative reality in which a Democratic President, during the nineteen-nineties or the two-thousands, defied the deficit hawks and also adopted a more skeptical approach to globalization. Such a President might, for example, have taken the advice of Dick Gephardt, another candidate in 1988, by introducing tariffs on goods from countries adjudged to have followed “unfair” trade practices. At the very least, this populist President would have demanded compensation for displaced workers in the form of proper retraining programs, relocation grants, and expanded incentives for businesses to invest in depressed regions. (In the Clinton White House, some people did push for such a policy, but they didn’t get far.) Empowered by living in a make-believe world, this President would also have funded the social investments that Jackson called for, doubled the minimum wage, made it easier for labor unions to organize, resisted efforts to weaken financial regulation, and regulated the gig economy. Maybe, they would even have introduced a Canadian-style universal health-care system.

It’s best not to get carried away. Unless we dispense with reality entirely, an economic populist in the Oval Office would still have had to deal with skeptical financial markets and a Congress largely beholden to business interests. In 1993, when Representative Bernie Sanders—whose 2016 Presidential bid made him the progressive heir to Jackson—introduced a bill to hike the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.50, only a few dozen of his colleagues signed on as co-sponsors. (It took until 1996, on the eve of another Presidential election, for a raise to get passed.) In 2009-10, the Obama Administration initially tried to include a public option in the Affordable Care Act but dropped the idea after it couldn’t get sixty votes in the Senate. And, in 2021-22, when Joe Biden called for universal preschool and affordable day care as part of his Build Back Better plan, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two Democratic senators, put the kibosh on the proposal.

Reality bites. Yet with a corrupt Republican billionaire having now twice elevated himself to the White House on a platform of fake economic populism, it’s surely fair to ask whether, going into 2028, the best political option for the Democrats may be to nominate someone who offers voters the real thing. Polls show majority support for raising taxes on rich people and corporations, limiting the influence of corporate and dark money on elections, increasing the minimum wage, supporting domestic industries, expanding federal funding of day care, and even (somewhat depending on how the question is posed) instituting Medicare for All. With A.I. creating fears of mass job displacement, there also appears to be strong public backing for regulating it and reining in the tech barons that control it—an approach that Sanders, for one, is championing. “Both Bernie and Jesse were treated skeptically by much of the Democratic Party because they were outsiders,” Borosage noted. “But if some insider did decide to run as a genuine economic populist—a popular governor say, who had some charisma—it’s still there to be had.”♦