Why progressives should talk to their enemies Jesse Jackson understood the power of persuasion

But then, the doomed presidential candidate rowed back. As Palmieri puts it: “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it.” The same apoplectic staffers predicted that, by meeting with Rogan, Harris would incite widespread anger among young progressives, threatening the campaign’s hope of high turnout among college-aged liberals.

It’s easy to imagine the conversation revolving around sickly terms in contemporary vogue, like “platforming” and “legitimising”. But strip back away the vocabulary, and the juvenile implication becomes clear: Joe Rogan has cooties, and if Kamala Harris sits next to him, she’ll get them too. But if her Democratic successors want to enjoy even the whiff of power over the years ahead, they’ll need to channel Jesse Jackson and engage with their opponents — and have the courage to explain why they’re wrong.

It is unlikely that Harris would have won the election even if she’d spent three hours on The Joe Rogan Experience. And, to be fair, there are reasons to object to the format. The stereotypical shock jock, he has aired conspiracy theories about vaccines and the moon landing, among many other topics, even as he features comedians who make jokes about rape.

In the end, though, candidates for political office must confront the world as it is: and the fact is that Rogan is a colossus, hosting a show boasting over 14 million listeners on Spotify and 17 million subscribers on YouTube. Increasingly, though, talking to people one finds disagreeable, or even objectionable, feels tantamount to heresy across much of the Left. When Bernie Sanders appeared on Rogan’s show, many progressives chastised him. It is common for university students to boycott, reject, or heckle Right-wing speakers. A political scientist at UC Berkeley has even argued that, if liberals hope to succeed, they must embrace a more forthright form of politics.

Clearly, no one would claim Rogan is anything like David Duke, a man who proudly led a domestic terrorist organisation that lynched black men, raped black women, firebombed black churches, and planted burning crosses on the yards of civil rights workers. And yet, faced with an opponent far more daunting than Harris’s Rogan, Jackson never blinked. Throughout his lively, but surprisingly civil, debate with Duke, he demonstrated not merely his brilliance, but also his confidence: the exact quality so lacking among young progressives who spend their time braying on social media.

Jackson, a civil rights leader who marched on Selma and served as a close aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, certainly had familiarity with conversation among a wide range of people. When he ran for president, in 1984 and 1988, he was the first candidate to make gay rights part of his campaign, conduct bilingual events with Latinos, and regularly appear on Native American reservations. In short, he helped create the “rainbow coalition” of the Democratic Party, while also speaking directly to constituencies that might otherwise oppose his message, such as white family farmers in Iowa, and coal miners in Kentucky. “We can leave the racial battleground,” Jackson would tell audiences, “to find economic common ground, and reach for moral higher ground.”

The same principles were clearly on display in 1977, with Jackson forcefully articulating belief in America as a multiracial democracy of expansive opportunity. That stood in stark opposition to Duke’s conception of the country as a white nationalist homeland, built by white people for white people. “The idea that America belongs only to white people has no theological base,” Jackson explained, “because white people did not make America, God did.”

Jackson added that the white nationalist fallacy also lacks a “historical base” — because, he said, even white academics accept Native Americans arrived first. The genius of the American experiment, Jackson argued, is that it brings people from “many nations” together to live in relative closeness and harmony. “America,” he emphasised, “is neither African nor European nor Asian.” To explain what he meant, the civil rights leader drew examples from America’s industrial base (Chinese building the railroads), and education (Jewish contributions to academia), and the military (the black soldiers during the Civil War). All these people, in their way, were Americans, even as they heralded from different racial groups.

How did Duke respond to this eloquent display of American unity? In the first place, he tried to disguise his hatred, but even then his racist mask slipped. He asserted, for instance, that black people were “culturally inferior” to whites, imagined Thomas Jefferson “throwing up” when walking through the south side of Chicago, and referred to American cities as “jungles.” He also enunciated the white whine that remains popular in 2024, rebuking the media for “denigrating” white Americans and conjuring a conspiracy to crush their political and economic rights. Duke even made the fatuous complaint that it’s unfair that black civil rights groups are socially acceptable — but the KKK isn’t.

Faced with such nonsense, Jackson never wavered. One of the most powerful aspects of the debate, in fact, is his laconic strength. He never lambasts Duke as “offensive” and never ridicules Edwards for “platforming” the KKK. Instead, he offered logic, historical knowledge, and rhetorical agility to show Duke as a fool. During one of the many interviews I conducted for my book on Jackson, he used the word “expose” to explain his willingness to debate Duke, linking the decision to his belief in performing “moral jiu-jitsu” on evil. “You use their own weight and force against them.”

Humour was another weapon in Jackson’s arsenal. There’s an exchange in the middle of the debate that captures Jackson’s success, provoking laughter from the audience, the host, and even Duke himself.

The KKK leader asserted that horses contributed more to the US economy than slaves. Then, he asked if horses deserve equal status as white citizens. Rather than merely voicing outrage over Duke’s comparison of black human beings to animals, Jackson responded with a joke: “If we are going to use hard physical work as the basis,” he quipped, “then, the horse will be in control, blacks will be second, and whites will be third. We’ll be run by horse power, and they will be rode by black power, and white people will be trying to fight for the rights of the horse.”

Repartee was a standard move in Jackson’s moral jiu-jitsu, and his riposte to Duke’s racism demonstrates that one can exploit entertainment tactics without succumbing to mindless populism in the Trumpist vein. At any rate, it’s another example for liberals: humour is more appealing than opprobrium.

In contrast with the contemporary era of endless moral panic, Jackson embarrassed Duke through reason, persuasion and wit. No less important, he deployed the same arguments to the political fights of tomorrow, stressing that intellectual excellence was critical to the progress of black Americans. “The Constitution of the United States, which has as its philosophical base theories of natural rights, represents the evolution of the highest logical thought in government,” Jackson told his audience, before explaining that black success depended upon the willingness to debate convincingly. African Americans, the preacher reminded viewers, were always destined to be a small minority. They therefore had to convince the white majority of the efficacy and morality of civil rights.

No less important, Jackson used his platform to speak beyond his black base. Like in his later political career, he evoked a prosperous future for all Americans, regardless of their colour. “I chose to participate on this programme,” he explained toward the end of the debate, “because as more white people develop economic anxieties and insecurities, they become more vulnerable to spurious logic, because their fears can be played upon by demagogues.” From there, Jackson outlined an agenda of shared prosperity, encompassing full employment through a robust infrastructure programme, alongside easier access to community banking and health care.

Given Trump has often wrapped his hatred of immigrants in vague terms — he talks of economic populism even as he’s accused foreigners of “poisoning the blood of the country” — Jackson’s proposals could have fit right into 2024. Certainly, his performance back in the Seventies elegantly shows why Democrats of tomorrow should worry less about “legitimising” their foes and more about demonstrating strong leadership on social and economic problems.

Speechcraft and policies should cleave closely together. And just as Jackson obviously had a robust grasp of the practicalities of politics back in 1977, so too did he wheel back and deliver a rhetorical knockout to his KKK opponent, along the way exposing his fundamental weakness in all its absurdity. “What is significant to me about Mr Duke’s argument,” Jackson explained, “is that he is not consistent with the highest, the best, and the most logical of white thought. He is representing a distinctly small minority whose logic is spurious and untenable.”

By the end of the debate, you almost get the sense that Duke agrees. Nervous and frustrated, he conceded that Jackson’s clear intelligence is not “representative” of the black race. Assuredness, then, is a crucial quality of leadership. Its absence invariably leads observers to question the strength of a candidate. Considering that Kamala Harris’s best campaign moment involved her destruction of Trump during their only presidential debate, it is all the more vexing that, because young progressives cannot comprehend the importance of argument and persuasion, she finally refused to go on Rogan’s podcast. Harris herself was a proud supporter of Jackson’s campaigns for the presidency in the Eighties. She had no excuse, then, to forget his example. By giving Rogan’s audience a case for liberalism and feminism, they might have been persuaded. At the very least, they’d have learned that Harris, and other feminists, are not as easy to caricature as some might imagine.

Nor, again, is this merely a lesson for history. Rather, in all those political battles that remain unfought, those on the Left should recognise, like Jackson before them, that confrontation and engagement are far more valuable than simply shunning the enemy. It is impossible, in the end, to perform moral jujitsu from outside the ring.