First Published: Frontline, Vol. 5, No. 19, March 28, 1988.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The self-described democratic socialist trend on the U.S. left is once again engaged in controversy over its appropriate relationship to a Jesse Jackson presidential campaign. The debate has been quite heated and has filled the pages of that trend’s most influential newspaper, In These Times, for three months now. Its intensity and scope indicate the major issues of strategy at stake as U.S. left social democracy strives to regain momentum after a period which its leading activists describe as without growth in numbers or influence.
The immediate spur for the present controversy was the December formal endorsement of Jackson by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). DSA is democratic socialism’s largest organization with roughly 5,000 members. In 1984, DSA refrained from backing Jackson, a stance which isolated the organization from the most vital progressive motion in that election year, and which drew heavy fire especially from minority activists in and around DSA.
This year, after extensive internal discussion and debate, a substantial majority of DSA was won to the view that endorsement and active participation in a second Jackson bid was the correct course to pursue. For many the reasons were pragmatic: they simply recognize that the Jackson camp was where the most progressive political action in the Democratic Party would be. For an organization committed to long-term work within the Democratic Party as the route to revitalize socialist-oriented politics in the U.S., this was sufficient to win a majority to vote for endorsement. This majority prevailed over those DSA members who fervently opposed Jackson (largely basing their arguments on his private – and since apologized for – anti-Semitic remarks in 1984), and those who argued that DSA should not endorse Jackson so long as large numbers of liberal-to-progressive trade union leaders back other candidates.
As a result of the national endorsement, those DSA locals which had been involved in the Rainbow Coalition ever since 1984 were given an additional boost for their efforts, and other DSA activists moved more aggressively into Jackson’s campaign. It appeared for the moment that the issue had been “settled” – prominent DSA members who had opposed the endorsement such as Irving Howe agreed to live with it – and that future open controversy would await summation in the late summer and fall.
It didn’t work out that way. In the January 13 issue of In These Times, senior political editor and national politics writer John Judis let loose a vitriolic blast at DSA entitled “New Page in Left History of Failure.” Judis called the Jackson endorsement “an attempt to overcome the limits that political reality has imposed upon the organization” through “opportunism and wishful thinking.” Judis attacked Jackson for “political grand-standing,” for “weakening Chicago’s reformers in the city council [in the wake of Mayor Harold Washington’s death],” for “lacking a positive economic program,” and for undercutting his “most important policy initiative in the Mideast ... by his own history of anti-Semitism.” Judis went on to attack the Rainbow Coalition for serving “primarily as a vehicle for Jackson’s political ambition.” And he concluded by taking DSA to task for trying to gain momentum by pursuing the “will o’ the wisp” of national presidential campaigns, terming the decision to endorse Jackson a “sign of desperation” signifying the “absence of any meaningful plan for growth and influence. ”
(Beside bashing DSA for its Jackson endorsement, Judis also attacked the group for entertaining debate on a proposal, ultimately defeated, to restrict national officers from criticizing the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in circumstances where such criticism might be interpreted as being an official DSA position. Judis’ criticism on this topic was the occasion for him to express once again his disdain for the Sandinista revolutionary project.)
Judis’ piece sparked a host of angry responses in the In These Times letters column over the next several issues. Members and ex-members of DSA, as well as other readers, disputed Judis’ assessment of Jackson, including his utterly unfounded claim that Jackson’s role in the battle over Mayor Washington’s succession had weakened rather than strengthened the reform camp. Several letters defended the DSA endorsement as the only serious way to help push forward progressive motion among Democrats in 1988, and as the best path for DSA to regain political initiative. A number challenged Judis’ contempt for the Sandinistas as well.
With the discussion filling column after column, In These Times publisher and editor James Weinstein weighed in (Feb. 3) with an editorial statement also criticizing the DSA endorsement. The editorial was more positive about Jackson than Judis had been; it acknowledged that Jackson’s candidacy had helped strengthen the left, but it echoed Judis’ views that the Jackson candidacy is severely flawed by personal ambition and anti-Semitism. Its bottom-line argument, however, was that the endorsement by an organization which currently has no substantial mass base of its own “does not strengthen DSA. It simply makes it a captive of the Jackson campaign while eliminating any chance to influence other candidates.”
This keep-our-options-open-with-other-candidates perspective is a step backward for In These Times, which earlier than many in DSA had targeted the new electoral motion centered in the Black community as key to constructing a mass progressive current in U.S. politics. Weinstein’s editorial provoked another round of responses (Feb. 24). These included a biting letter from Duane Campbell, the chair of DSA’s Anti-Racism Commission, and the co-chair of its Latino Commission, Dolores Delgado Campbell. Their letter pointed out that “DSA, like much of the left and In These Times, suffers from a dominance of the white left.” They went on to stress the “multi-ethnic character of the working class,” and argued that “a broad social democratic electoral coalition is being developed; we should not avoid the coalition because it is primarily led by Blacks.”
In fitting juxtaposition, the very same issue of In These Times contained another piece by Judis which underscored the relevance of the Campbell’s stress on anti-racism. The article was entitled “Gephardt’s Neo-Populism Appeals to Blue Collar Vote,” and carried the logic of Judis’ earlier diatribe against DSA to its logical conclusion. He waxed enthusiastic about the switch-positions-when-convenient Missouri representative, praising Gephardt for running a “neo-populist campaign” that blamed “establishment interests,” including multinational corporations and Wall Street speculators, for the nation’s economic ills. He denied that Gephardt’s appeal was based on “racism, protectionism and national chauvinism.” He also took a swipe at Jackson for running a campaign “focused exclusively on the poor and unemployed” rather than the “great working majority” whom Judis implies is the target of Gephardt’s appeal.
Judis was even more unrestrained, however, in an Op- Ed piece published in the New York Times February 11. There he all but gave Gephardt his formal endorsement, praising the candidate for speaking “passionately to an underlying concern with economic decline, whether manifested in farm foreclosures or the influx of foreign cars.” Judis’ recipe for beating the Republicans in 1988 was to avoid “themes and imagery ... of the Democratic past” such as opposition to contra aid or concern for the homeless, and instead to “define a clear economic message” along the lines of Gephardt’s protectionist economic nationalism.
Finally, illustrating that his ability to forecast the political winds is no better than his ideological outlook, Judis predicted steady gains for the Missouri representative and jubilantly exclaimed that “Gephardt has shown the way in Iowa.”
Judis’ poor predictions aside, however, the real significance of his position is that it represents an impulse which – despite DSA’s endorsement of Jackson – retains considerable influence within U.S. left social democracy. That impulse is to regard emphasis on the fight against racism or for international working class solidarity as at best diversions from “more important issues,” and at worst as divisive and counterproductive. Those “more important issues” are whatever immediate economic demands seem to hold quick appeal for the layer of U.S. workers who are white and more or less regularly employed.
To those who share Judis’ perspective, the key to building a socialist movement in the U.S. is to organize on the basis the most narrow possible conception of direct “economic self-interest,” and to avoid at all costs a challenge to any of the more backward prejudices. Judis’ enthusiasm for Gephardt expresses this strategic outlook in a particularly crude form. Consequently he is now more or less isolated on the far right edge of his political trend. But the premises which underly Judis’ thinking can be expected to resurface in a variety of forms as left social democracy in the U.S. struggles to develop and mature.
But following the current primary season, the DSA endorsement will be debated within DSA and in the pages of In These Times on new terrain. Whatever any particular activists’ ideological or racial blindspot, the inescapable political reference point will be the fact that the 1988 Jackson campaign has successfully reached out to millions with a progressive peace, jobs and justice banner carried by a Black man.