Jesse Jackson's unapologetic progressivism was rebellion at its core

"By the early 1980s, the Democratic party was facing a crossroads. The 1980 landslide election of Ronald Reagan, who clenched the presidency with a whopping 489 electoral college votes against Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, swiftly pulled the Democratic party to the right in the political and cultural wave of the Reagan Revolution. For those Democratic constituents left behind, however, a challenge was mounting, mostly within US industrial cities whose economies were ransacked by Reagan's trickle-down economics."

"Record tax cuts for the wealthy had come at the expense of a contracted social safety net, thus exacerbating inequality and collapsing much of the working class into the poor. Grassroots resistance campaigns spawned across the country in response to this dire urban crisis that had disproportionately devastated African Americans, and between 1982 and 1984 they had registered 2 million new Black voters the largest gain in registered Black voters since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act."

"By the 1970s, in the wake of King's assassination, Jackson had transferred the movement's master-classes in strategic organizing into founding Operation Push, a populist leftist offshoot of the SCLC that coalesced progressive whites, LGBTQ+ communities, environmentalists, Asian Americans, Indigenous Nations, Latinos, anti-war activists, and labor unions. Jackson led discussions with leadership across the country about the prospect for a national Black-backed progressive movement that could map a viable path to a Democratic nomination for president."

The Reagan landslide of 1980 pushed the Democratic party rightward while Reaganomics devastated industrial cities, contracting the social safety net and increasing inequality. Urban working-class communities, especially African Americans, faced acute economic decline that spurred grassroots resistance and large voter registration efforts. Between 1982 and 1984, those campaigns registered two million new Black voters, the largest gain since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Jesse Jackson applied civil rights organizing tactics to found Operation Push and to build broad progressive coalitions, aiming to translate grassroots mobilization into a national Black-backed progressive movement and presidential viability.

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