ROD DREHER: Jesse Jackson: Godfather of the Great Awokening.
In a sense, Jackson never fully recovered from his love child scandal. With Democrats out of the White House through most of the 2000s, he had much less influence. The next Democrat to take the presidency was Barack Obama, who, as the first black president, de facto diminished Jackson’s unique role.
Then again, it could be argued that in the Obama era and beyond there was no need for Jesse Jackson, because his worldview—one based on leveraging identity politics for political and corporate power—had broadly triumphed in elite culture.
In 1987, Jackson joined a student protest at Stanford University, demanding an end to its mandatory “Western Culture” humanities course. “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” protesters chanted. The students won. In the next academic year, Stanford introduced a multicultural replacement, including non-Western perspectives and those from women and people of color.
That protest, and Jackson’s role in nationalizing its anti-Western goals, drew considerable comment at the time. Within 30 years, though, what was then seen as a radical demand had become the establishment position within all academia, and remains so today.
And:
Though Jesse Jackson was only a shadow of his former activist self at the time of his passing, his significance should not be overlooked. Though the Great Awokening had many sources, the canny and entrepreneurial Reverend Jackson was its godfather. If you seek his monument, look to every corporate HR department and major media institution, and to university programming, and patterns of foundation grant-making over the last 20 years or so.
And, more darkly, look to the rise of identity politics in the younger generation of whites, who are not intimidated by Jackson-style moralizing. A growing number of them openly embrace pro-white racism, violating a taboo on which Jackson’s moral power depended. What was good, financially and politically, for Jesse Jackson, his allies, and his activist descendants may yet prove disastrous for American democracy.
Regarding the “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” protest at Stanford, in his obit for Jackson at NRO, Dan McLaughlin wrote:
Charity toward the departed suggests leaving off further discussion of Jackson’s public career here, but not without noting the man’s abundant gifts as a public speaker in his prime. As P. J. O’Rourke described Jackson’s convention speech in 1988: “I did, however, want to hear Jesse Jackson speak. He is the only living American politician with a mastery of classical rhetoric. Assonance, alliteration, litotes, pleonasm, parallelism, exclamation, climax and epigram — to listen to Jesse Jackson is to hear everything mankind has learned about public speaking since Demosthenes. Thus Jackson, the advocate for people who believe themselves to be excluded from Western culture, was the only 1988 presidential candidate to exhibit any of it.”
Concurrent with Jackson as Patient Zero in the Great Awokening, from Newt Gingrich to Dubya and Jeb Bush to Trump, Jackson never saw a Republican he couldn’t compare to Hitler, despite wishing to see socialism to go national himself, endorsing Bernie Sanders in 2020.
