At the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, the Rev. Jesse Jackson conceded defeat in his second campaign for the party’s presidential nomination. A gifted orator, Jackson was the first black man to make a serious bid for a major party’s presidential nomination. He was also a champion for a fiercely progressive agenda on both domestic and foreign policy. Jackson’s campaigns helped pave the way for both Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders.
His campaigns could also sound downright, well, America First.
In 1988, hope for the American left was dim. Jackson had just lost the primary; Democrats would go on to lose the general, their third presidential defeat in a row. But in his concession speech, Jackson articulated a hopeful vision for a multiracial social democracy. In addition to broadsides against Reaganomics and support for a strong social safety net, Jackson’s speech articulated what progressive foreign policy should look like—a message that couldn’t be more relevant today.
“We’re spending $150 billion dollars a year defending Europe and Japan 43 years after the war is over,” he said. “Let them share more of the burden of their own defense. Use some of that money to build decent housing. Use some of that money to educate our children. Use some of that money for long-term health care. Use some of that money to wipe out these slums and put America back to work!” The crowd roared.
He continued: “If we can bail out Europe and Japan … we can bail out the family farmer…. It does not make sense to be escorting all our tankers up and down the Persian Gulf paying $2.50 for every one dollar worth of oil we bring out, while oil wells are capped in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.”
“Trump’s America First worldview is seen as a right-wing posture.”
A year earlier, a celebrity businessman named Donald Trump had hit many similar notes in a full-page New York Times ad criticizing America’s global security commitments. The rhetorical echoes between the ad and Jackson’s speech are remarkable. “For decades,” wrote Trump, “Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States. The saga continues unabated as we defend the Persian Gulf, an area of only marginal significance to the United States for its oil supplies but one upon which Japan and others are almost totally dependent.” Trump added: “Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend as allies. Let’s help our farmers, our sick, our homeless by taking from some of the greatest profit machines ever created.” It’s hard to think of two figures in recent American political history who are as far removed in legacy, temperament, and partisanship than Donald Trump and Jesse Jackson. Yet both men expressed similar frustrations with US foreign policy within a year of each other. Neither Jackson’s nor Trump’s critiques resonated much in 1988, with the hawkish GOP of Ronald Reagan dominating US politics and the “hyperpower” about to enter the peak of its unipolar moment. Yet in the decades since, the salience of their message has only grown as Americans have wearied of misguided trade deals and even more misguided foreign wars.
Today, Trump’s America First worldview is seen as a right-wing posture. Certainly, the phrase is associated with earlier isolationist tendencies that bore an anti-Semitic stain. But Jackson’s speech is a reminder that reducing military spending and global commitments to invest at home has historically been a foreign-policy goal for the left—one that the left mustn’t cede to the right.
Democrats in recent years have reflexively hit Trump for just about any break with foreign-policy orthodoxy, from seeking diplomacy with Russia and North Korea to questioning NATO commitments and free-trade deals. But Democrats and other Trump critics looking to score quick partisan points by attacking Trump’s America First views have missed a larger truth, and unwittingly created a political vulnerability and an advantage for Trump. The truth is that Americans of all backgrounds are genuinely frustrated with the costs of America’s expansive security commitments and interventions.
Those frustrations have dramatically shaped America’s presidential politics for nearly two decades now. It was in large part American frustration over the disastrous Iraq War that helped Barack Obama win both the Democratic nomination and the presidency in 2008. Trump’s claim that he opposed the Iraq War was also a significant factor in his shock 2016 victory, striking a clear contrast with primary opponents like Jeb Bush.
Interestingly, both Obama and Trump had to first defeat Hillary Clinton to reach the Oval Office—Obama in the primary and Trump in the general. Both men used Hillary’s vote in favor of the Iraq War as a cudgel against her. Similarly, in the 2024 election, Trump skillfully exploited Vice President Kamala Harris’s misguided embrace of Liz Cheney, linking the Democratic nominee with the disastrous post-9/11 conflicts. This, even though Harris had never voted for a foreign war and had even cosponsored the war-powers resolutions in the Senate. It’s a sad testament to how far Democrats have come from the foreign-policy “common sense” that Jesse Jackson spoke about in 1988. One can imagine what Jackson might have said were he running for president today. “Why should Americans, who lack a Nordic-style social democratic safety net, pay for the defense of Swedes and Finns, who enjoy exactly that?” he might ask. There are, to be sure, good arguments for NATO expansion, and Finland and Sweden in particular are able to carry their own military weight within NATO (having served on US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s staff as the process of Swedish and Finnish ascension into NATO began, I am very familiar with the details).
But to put it bluntly: Concern for Nordic security isn’t high on the priority list in, say, the rural Mexican-American towns of South Texas or the California Central Valley, the kinds of places where many of the casualties of America’s recent wars came from, where universal health care would be welcome among impoverished farm workers, and where Latino voters moved decisively to the right in the recent election.
“These are all questions that would resonate with American voters.”
One can imagine other questions a Jesse Jackson Democrat might ask today: Why should the United States spend billions on a nuclear arsenal we must never use, instead of making school lunch free? Why should the United States spend millions dropping bombs on Yemen when it could reopen rural hospitals? Why should working people in America go without social programs while committing to defending European societies that can afford to defend themselves? Why should the United States help pick up the tab for an Israeli war in Gaza while Israelis enjoy better social programs than Americans?
These are all questions that would resonate with American voters. Yet it’s hard to imagine most Democratic foreign policy leaders asking them in a public setting today. Abandoning this sort of populist, (Jesse) Jacksonian rhetoric on foreign policy is likely one significant factor in Democrats’ declining appeal to rural and working-class voters—the party’s traditional base since the Age of (Andrew) Jackson.
The abandonment of populist “America First” style rhetoric by Democrats has come with other political missteps. In our rush to distance ourselves from the America First slogan, we Democrats missed golden opportunities to critique Trump’s domestic and foreign policies on their own terms. Indeed, rather than “helping our sick, homeless, and farmers” as Trump proposed in 1987, the Trump administration that held power from 2017 to 2021 sought to cut farm-worker wages, to sabotage ObamaCare, and to defund Social Security. Trump didn’t succeed in creating manufacturing jobs or revitalizing unions; instead, the offshoring of jobs accelerated on his watch. His major legislative achievement was a tax cut for some of the wealthiest corporations and individuals that was engineered by then-House Speaker Paul Ryan.
In foreign policy, too, Trump frequently failed to put America first. He didn’t end a single war, and ramped up many existing ones. Trump’s Middle East policy turned America into little more than a mercenary for petro-states like Saudi Arabia that he had critiqued in the 1980s. The first Trump administration invested billions in nuclear weapons, while kicking hundreds of thousands of Americans off food stamps. Jackson, who called for a no-first-use nuclear posture in his 1988 speech and for feeding the hungry, would surely be appalled. We must hope that Trump’s second term will be different, though some of his initial appointments to important security posts suggest more of the same. Yet why is that second term upon us at all? The Biden-Harris administration had much to brag about in the America First department. President Biden has a real record of bringing manufacturing jobs back home. He has empowered labor unions to a dramatic extent, becoming the first sitting president to walk a picket line, even taking on the German government over Mercedes union-busting in Alabama.
“It was Biden who pulled US troops out of Afghanistan, fulfilling an original 2016 Trump goal.”
Biden has overall responsibly managed escalatory concerns with Russia, rejecting reckless calls for a no-fly zone that could have brought Russia into direct conflict with the United States and the Western Alliance. Most notably, it was Biden who pulled US troops out of Afghanistan, fulfilling an original 2016 Trump goal and enduring significant elite criticism.
This is the foreign-policy pitch the Democrats should have made in 2024, justifying truly necessary support for Ukraine and core treaty commitments in a broader strategy of really putting America first. Instead, the Biden-Harris administration allowed ever-expanding foreign-policy commitments and significant military aid to allies and partners to sour on an American public more concerned about the cost of living and alarmed at a growing sense of chaos all over the world. This led many Americans to conclude that their government cared more for the needs of distant lands than their own.
A second Trump victory is a hard way for Democrats to relearn a lesson that we should have never forgotten: Foreign policy must remain downstream of the needs of Americans at home—never the other way around. In 1988, the Rev. Jesse Jackson showed the left how to make that case.