The veteran conservative journalist Tom Bethell coined the phrase “strange new respect” to describe liberal media adulation of a formerly conservative—or in today’s parlance, right-coded—figure who shifts leftward.
What then describes the somewhat more than grudging MAGA admiration for Jesse Jackson, the civil rights activist and two-time Democratic presidential candidate who died Tuesday?
President Donald Trump had a long history with Jackson before entering politics and becoming a right-coded figure himself. Trump’s Truth Social post on Jackson’s death was surprisingly laudatory, even warm, and slightly more personal than his video tribute to conservative talk-radio icon Rush Limbaugh, who died five years earlier on the same date.
The Trump nominee Jeremy Carl shared a 1988 Jackson for president commercial, calling it “one of the best campaign ads I’ve ever seen.” Vice President J.D. Vance reposted Carl, saying he had a “close family member” who had only voted in two presidential primaries in her whole life: once for Jackson in 1988 and then for Trump in 2016.
A Jackson-Trump voter would at first glance seem like a stranger political specimen than the Obama-Trump voters who helped swing the 2016 election.
But perhaps not. Jackson was a populist, even if he was a man of the left. He was in his own day and way trying to forge the multiracial working-class coalition that many populists on the right envision now. He was defeated for the Democratic nomination by the most boring liberal technocrat imaginable, with predictable general-election results.
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