Seeing that indefatigable firebrand Jesse Jackson in British headlines the other day (Steven W Thrasher interviewed him here) reminded me of a thought I’d forgotten that I had about his bid for White House in 1988. It may have a bearing on Jeremy Corbyn’s looming leadership of the Labour party.
The Republican candidate to succeed Ronald Reagan in 1988 was his vice president, George Bush senior, a scion of the east coast patrician elite who had been preparing for the job in a succession of grand posts all his life, as his campaign slogan reminded voters. Someone even dug out grainy footage of him being rescued after his bomber was shot down over the Pacific in 1944. He was 20. Not bad.
Bush was decent and dutiful enough, but dull, an adequate conservative president, who could have been taken out by a smarter opponent, as Bill Clinton demonstrated four years later. But the Democrats had ended up picking Michael Dukakis, the pint-sized governor of Massachusetts, a very mediocre candidate who made that plank, Al Gore, sound like a demagogue.
The point of my reminiscence is that after traipsing around following the uninspiring duo for a few weeks, I concluded that Dukakis was doomed (he took only 10 states). “He’s so bad that the Dems might as well have run Jesse Jackson. He wouldn’t have won either, but he’d have run a powerful and exciting campaign. It would have fired up the base and involved the kind of voters who don’t normally vote,” I told my best pal (me).
You can see where I’m heading by now, I hope.
Jackson had been a serious challenger for the nomination in 1988. The preacher activist won seven primaries and four caucuses, with 6.9 million votes. He would have lost the White House because he couldn’t reassure the progressive white middle class as the more cerebral Barack Obama would do 20 years later.
If their party could have blended their talents who know what a great president Barack O’Jackson might have made? Jackson was, probably still is, a wonderful speaker and took on difficult audiences. He warned black teenagers against early parenthood (“children having children”) and used a biblical parable to urge a wheelchair audience not to feel sorry for themselves.
One of his stock routines I always enjoyed in 1988 was about the threat then emerging to US manufacturing jobs. “How many of you own a cruise missile?” he would ask a crowd. No hands up. “How many own a VCR (this was the age of TV videotape)?” A forest of hands up. “That’s it, you see. We make the cruise missiles and the Japanese [or was it South Koreans?] make the VCRs.” Laughter, but a serious political point made too.
Fast forward to the Labour leadership campaign, increasingly like an American primary elections series, in 2015. All sorts of people, starting with Tony Blair, are trying to deflect a Corbyn win because they are certain that he cannot win a UK general election despite the enthusiasm of the crowds he draws. I heard a Welsh Labour politician on the radio at the weekend likening his meetings to a revivalist movement: big crowds but no bigger congregation in chapel next Sunday.
But there have been passionate pro-Corbyn pieces too. Here’s Owen Jones acknowledging the difficulties ahead and Patrick Wintour’s experienced eye. Here’s a thoughtful piece by the playwright David Edgar, setting out what an inspiring and campaigning movement Labour could again become. Tom Watson, frontrunner for the party’s No 2 spot, is already having to hose down excessive zeal.
I don’t happen to agree with Edgar’s analysis, but it’s serious and thoughtful: who knows, I may be wrong about the British electorate. It may be about to be swept off its feet as part of the global reaction against current elites, against inequality and austerity measures which hurt the poorest most.
Since I last posed this question the list of rising populist stars, from Alexis Tsipras, Corbyn doppelgänger Bernie Sanders and Nicola Sturgeon on the left to Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage on the right has expanded to include Ben Carson, the brilliant black American neurosurgeon with a great backstory and very conservative views. He’s giving Trump a hard time. Good. Trump makes Nigel Farage sound like David Attenborough.
So it’s all kicking off, as Paul Mason likes to put it. But what’s kicking off? In which direction? And how far? Let me frame the question in terms of my young friend, Dave, a 30-something northerner, living in the south.
Never very political, Dave surprised everyone recently by announcing that he’d paid his £3 to become a Labour supporter in order to vote for the north London MP.
Why? “Because what he says is what I think and I’ve not had that experience with Labour politicians before. I don’t care if he doesn’t win, I want to vote for someone I feel comfortable with,” is the drift of Dave’s explanation. You’ve probably heard it too and not just from novices like Dave.
I know all sorts of well-scrubbed middle class Labour supporters, middle aged or elderly, the sort of people who have lived uncomfortably through 13 years of Labour government and been fired up by Corbyn meetings. Many have either voted for Jeremy or intend to do so before the ballot closes at noon on Thursday, ahead of the result on Saturday morning.
Despite the election result on 7 May, many believe Britain has swung left during the recession (see how Edgar tots up the voting numbers), is ready for a major shake-up (“just look at Scotland”) and that Corbyn or someone like him will prove a winner in 2020.
Others, including Labour veterans as devoted and experienced as the Corbynistas, think that analysis is sentimental tripe, narcissistic and innumerate. Just look at the labour force data: trade union membership is barely 25% of those in employment, 14% in the private sector.
True, it’s 55% in the public sector (where a lot of Corbyn audiences come from, I suspect), but that shrinking share of the overall workforce is just 17% or 3 million workers: 10% of the total compared with 50% in small or medium sized businesses. Some 15% of people are now self-employed, a huge change. Get real, Jeremy!
But my interest here is that section of the Corbyn crowd which wants to vote for someone they can believe in and feel comfortable with regardless of whether or not he can win power and govern. Edgar seems to fit into that camp when he admits his opponents “may be right”.
That’s as different from New Labour as you can get, different too from the likes of Neil Kinnock, Michael Foot and their hero/mentor Nye Bevan, who scorned the “pure but impotent” lobby on the left. Bevan got his hands dirty and built the NHS before bailing out and causing trouble (he had a late repentance).
The Lib Dems used to be the main repository of the “not in my name” school of hand-washing, which says: “They’re all as bad as each other”, though assorted nationalists, including the Ukip variety, and the internationalist Greens, also had a slice of that electoral market.
But for Labour consciously to espouse heroic defeatism and the risk of a long Tory ascendancy would be something else.
It would be a bit like backing Plymouth Argyle, as some of my pals do (Michael Foot too), through thick and mostly thin, defeated 2-1 by Stevenage on Saturday. A bit like buying the weekly lottery ticket because things feel so bad that even 13 million to 1 odds are worth a quid.
Three quid in Corbyn’s case. Perhaps the reported late surge of support for Yvette Cooper – the Guardian’s editorial choice – will see him defeated. I sense not. But that would cause ructions too, a distinct sense of anti-climax to say the least.
Either way politics is set to get livelier.
The Tory right will sense an opportunity in Labour’s weakness (David Cameron’s weakness too?) and in Corbyn’s ambivalence on Europe and the wider world.
So will the rival nationalisms of the SNP and Ukip. Fired up by Syriza’s similarly heroic defeatism in Greece (at least it won an election!) leftwing activists (I put it no stronger) who have rejoined Labour will want to see some extra-parliamentary street action.
At last a chance to defy mere electoralism and give Jeremy the support he needs but doesn’t get from his reluctant MPs! It will be worse if Corbyn proves an ineffectual parliamentary leader. Some elderly armchair revolutionaries have been waiting for decades to express what they claim to be the people’s will. Remember the poll tax riots, eh! Rightwing agitators may take their cue too.
So lively and heady times lie ahead whatever Saturday’s outcome, with the potential to be dangerous and divisive too. But it won’t be dull.
