At 11 pm on July 17, 1984, Jesse Jackson strode to the podium at the Democratic National Convention to deliver a nearly hour-long speech. Many saw his appearance as the high point of an otherwise drab event. Jackson had lost after a bruising presidential primary fight, and the organizers hoped he would use the speech to heal divisions in the party. Instead, Jackson demanded a place in the party’s agenda for progressive policies and his multiracial voting base, which he anointed the Rainbow Coalition. He counseled the Democrats to spread the message that “all of us count and all of us fit somewhere.” And he insisted that if the party advocated reallocating defense spending to building bridges, schools, and hospitals — providing jobs and better services for all — then “the whole nation will come running to us.”

The presidential elections of 1984 and 1988 generally reside in the wastebasket of Democratic Party history, cautionary tales dredged up only to illustrate a dark chapter in the party’s past. Yet looking beyond the November electoral returns to the primary campaigns of Jesse Jackson in those two elections reveals a pivotal moment when the vision and composition of the Democratic Party was very much in flux — and a universalist, social-democratic politics could have won out over the market boosterism, “choice and competition,” and upper-middle-class-centric approach of the Democratic Leadership Council.

From New Deal to Atari Democrats

The New Deal of the 1930s and ’40s fundamentally remade the Democratic Party, the nation’s political economy, and ordinary people’s relationship with the federal government. The hope of the movement reached its apotheosis in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1944 Second Bill of Rights, which proposed a right to employment, housing, education, and health care and a counterweight to corporate power.

The New Deal itself fell short of delivering on these promises. It was never fully universal, connecting key privileges like Social Security to work rather than to citizenship and containing loopholes that excluded African Americans, women, and other marginalized groups from many programs. Yet its key social provisions, commitment to labor rights, and advocacy of full employment transformed the nation’s economy and shifted the balance of power away from employers and toward all workers. The state of California and New York City applied these principles at the local level, creating tuition-free public higher education, services like municipal hospitals and clinics, and a bevy of public-sector jobs.