(4 of 12)
Jesse Jackson was different; he changed the politics of 1984.
Political appetite came upon him slowly, then faster. His demands began with a first "litmus test"—that runoff primaries, South and North, be abolished because such contests gave blacks less of a chance of winning than they would have had in a free-for-all involving divided whites. In June he demanded that the rules of the Democratic Party established as recently as 1982 be discarded to give him a share of delegates proportionate to the number of those who had voted for him; the Democrats compromised, setting up at his insistence a "fairness" commission to supervise, patrol and probably again rewrite the rules governing their primaries in 1988.
And then at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco, Jackson made his cause clear. The morning after his stunning speech of conciliation and redemption, he spoke to the Black Caucus. "Women got what they want," he said, "in Geraldine Ferraro; the South got what it wants in Bert Lance. What did you get?—you ain't got nothing!" He made his demands sharp: that the Democratic Party in the South establish in each of the old Confederate states one distinct district where a black Congressman would be nominated and, with the support of the party, be elected. In other words: not participation by individual merit but group participation with rewards shared by the numbers of race. He ran this course into the campaign: blacks must wait for Jesse's "signal," white politicians must negotiate for black votes through his Rainbow Coalition.
Jackson has staked out a new separatism in multiracial America, and it menaces the culture of our politics, for it challenges the bedrock faith of a nation whose secular theology is equality. Is America a nation of individual Americans or a nation of separate communities? If communities were to be given rewards and responsibilities distributed on lines of kinship, ancestry, skin color or religion, the Lebanonization of American politics might lie down the road. And then would come the Orientals, Caribbeans, Africans with other demands. Was ours a nation of separate groups? Or a nation of individual people clinging to the notion that all men are created equal, a nation that chooses the best of its individuals to speak for it?
The surge that Jesse Jackson called forth will not go away. Nor will the fears it roused in the South and in the Northern urban centers. It will be there in 1988, under Jackson's name or another. It is his legacy to the election of 1988. How much fear of blacks contributed to Reagan's white majority is still to be measured.
The stirring of black separatism linked another phenomenon in 1984—another underswell from a distant past now requiring full recognition. It could be called the ethnic emergence.
I remember as the most vivid of the episodes of the long trail of 1984 the redefinition of the Democratic Party at its convention in San Francisco. The faces and feel were so completely different that only by effort could I remember the Democratic conventions of the '50s, dominated by Southerners and big-city politicians. Eighteen percent of the delegates in 1984 were black; 6.5% were Hispanic; Indians in