Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach persuasively argue that the Democratic Party’s forty-year adherence to moderation is no longer a winning one. For poor and Black Americans, in particular, it has always been a losing strategy. Reverend Jesse Jackson’s two runs for president, in 1984 and 1988, offer a particularly dramatic illustration of its costs, moral as well as strategic. Jackson understood that moderation not only deprioritized the working class, people of color, and other marginalized people but also demobilized them as an electoral force. His vision couldn’t be more relevant as the Democratic Party faces similar calls today.

Jackson’s campaigns embodied a striking alternative to the centrism then emerging as a dominant force among Democrats. Founded in 1985 in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s reelection, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) sought to bring the national party back to what it called the “mainstream.” Taking back the White House, the DLC insisted, required sidelining “divisive” issues like civil rights and economic justice and prioritizing allegedly more unifying ones like economic growth, public safety, and family values.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the former advisor to John F. Kennedy and staunch liberal of The Vital Center (1949), had harsh words for this “rush toward Reaganism.” “Faint-hearted Democrats feel that President Reagan knows a secret,” he railed in the New York Times, “and that if they could only learn the secret they could be as popular as he is.” To “vie with Reaganites” and “show equal enthusiasm for cutting back social programs, for deregulation, for abandonment of racial minorities” was a grave mistake. Yet the most sustained critique came from Jackson, a party outsider. He derided the DLC as the “Democrats for the Leisure Class.” “Don’t nobody get moved by any milder, modified version of anything,” he intoned. “People rather have fire on their hands or cold ice on their face than just warm spit down their neck. If people have to choose between the authentic and an imitation, they’ll choose the authentic every time.”

Jackson’s first campaign focused on uniting a “rainbow coalition.” It was certainly authentic in its desire to mobilize “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised,” but its execution proved haphazard. His later run supplemented that movement energy with the polish and professionalism of a serious political operation, more intentionally cultivating an expanded coalition of racial minorities, women, dispossessed farmers, displaced workers, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and young people. This growing group of people, he argued—the many victimized by Reaganomics—should form the future base of the party.

And it wasn’t just rhetoric. His platform offered searing moral clarity of the kind so devoid from Democratic messaging today. He positioned Reaganomics and unchecked corporate power as existential threats to working people’s survival. There was little ambiguity in his framing of the crisis and the social democratic vision needed to meet it. He clearly identified what was right—a platform that would “make corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes,” “ensure women’s dignity and equality,” “defend and promote the rights of lesbians and gay men,” and “meet the needs of the elderly”—as well as what was wrong: auto plant closings, wage cuts, environmental racism, and poor housing, the totality of what he called “economic violence.” He presented a principled message that wasn’t tested or polled but spoke to people’s moral compass. And it had a tremendous impact. The movement mobilized millions—around 3.3 million in 1984 and 7 million in 1988—to turn out to cast a vote in the Democratic Party primaries.

Jackson’s success frustrated pro-moderation forces in the party. The most compelling critiques came from fellow Black Democrats, among them Jackson’s former Southern Christian Leadership Conference colleague, Atlanta mayor Andrew Young. Young argued the country just wouldn’t go for a Black candidate, especially one as inexperienced and controversial as Jackson. The stakes of rolling back Reaganism were too high. Instead, Young argued, Black leaders and voters needed to be pragmatic, supporting the most progressive candidate capable of winning back the Reagan Democrats through a moderate agenda.

But these critics failed to grasp, or perhaps admit, two key ideas.

First was the power of voter mobilization, which the DLC had deemed a “myth.” Jackson mobilized critical constituencies in several key swing states the Democrats sought to win back, outperforming many of the DLC-backed moderate Democrats on the first Super Tuesday in March 1988. Moderates had organized Super Tuesday as a Southern-focused regional primary, intending the results to boost more conservative candidates and disrupt the momentum of progressives.

That didn’t happen. Jackson won the most popular votes that day and finished first or second in sixteen of the twenty contests. He also won not only the Black vote but also finished first among liberals, labor, women, young people, and first-time primary voters. More surprisingly, he finished second among conservatives, showing how lapsed voters in swing states could be mobilized by an ideologically charged vision emphasizing both common interests and common enemies. Of course, Jackson didn’t wind up winning the nomination; he faced a moderate countermobilization to “Stop Jesse” after these wins. But his defeat doesn’t discredit the wisdom of his approach. These victories reveal the potential of his mobilization strategy—one that perhaps could be realized by a future candidate with actual investment from party leaders and donors.

Second, Jackson’s critics ignored the consequences of failing to deliver for Black and poor people. Compromising in the name of pragmatism meant sidelining civil rights, full employment, anti-poverty policies, and other concerns important to those DLC centrists disparaged as “special interests”—the forerunner of today’s derision of “the groups.” While in a narrow sense moderation as an electoral strategy perhaps could be said to have “worked” for the Democrats in the 1990s—Clinton’s victory against George H. W. Bush probably had more to do with the recession of 1990–1991, and by 1996 he enjoyed the advantage of incumbency with falling unemployment—it certainly did not work for the marginalized.

Indeed, poor people and minorities were among the most harmed by Clinton’s politics of moderation: the humiliation of Sister Souljah at a 1992 meeting of the National Rainbow Coalition provided future moderates with a blueprint for dismissing the righteous rage of Black youth; criminal justice legislation expanded police power in poor communities and intensified mass incarceration; welfare reform shredded the social safety net for poor families; free trade without adequate protections for labor, along with financial deregulation as a boon to capital, would decimate the working and middle classes; and ramped-up immigration enforcement laid the foundation for a system of mass deportation. In short, working-class, Black, and marginalized America was sacrificed on the altar of moderation, breeding profound skepticism and alienation that continues to hurt the party’s viability to this day.

As we approach the next presidential election, major DLC figures like William Galston and Elaine Kamarck have reiterated calls similar to those they made almost forty years ago, while new organizations like the Searchlight Institute and WelcomePAC double down on moderation as a cure-all, serving much the same function as the DLC once did. Meanwhile, liberal media have been floating the names of a number of white moderates to head the 2028 ticket, from Gavin Newsom to Josh Shapiro and Andy Beshear. But if Democrats want to defeat authoritarianism—if they really want to become a governing force again, to stand on principle for society’s most marginalized, and to deal a decisive blow to the right’s long-term prospects—they should draw inspiration from Jesse Jackson’s insurgent campaigns.

The path is clear: seek out an authentic candidate with an agenda that expands our ideas of what is politically possible, someone who can lead a diverse coalition united by a renewed sense of justice and collective purpose.