MARSHALLTOWN, IOWA—A whole passel of us—reporters, campaign workers, the odd passers-by, and one friendly old farm dog—were stomping around the sidewalk, trying to keep warm and waiting for Bernie Sanders, who was doing a walk-and-talk TV interview coming up the street toward us. It was a dead-level time of a Sunday afternoon. Not much was open in downtown Marshalltown. A TV reporter from Minneapolis wanted to interview me. "I'm part of the ubiquitous media," the guy said. "So am I," I told him, and we both had a laugh because nothing says Iowa caucuses like one reporter accosting another unaware in a small town where practically everything is closed because it's Sunday afternoon.

One of the people standing around the sidewalk, waiting for the approaching candidate, was Steve Cobble, whose specialty is wrangling delegates. In 1988, he did it for the campaign of Jesse Jackson. (Ironically, Tad Devine, who is Bernie Sanders's campaign manager, did that same job that year for Michael Dukakis. Devine won.) The two Jackson campaigns—1984 and 1988—have become lost from the political narrative of the following 30 years, but they are an undeniable historical source modern progressive Democratic politics in general, and for its manifestation in the Sanders campaign this time around.

"The interesting thing is that Bernie was a Jackson supporter, and was one of the two white officeholders to risk their jobs across the color line, so Jim Hightower (the longtime Texas populist firebrand) and Bernie were the two that did that, and he helped us win the Vermont caucus in April of '88, which is actually when I met Bernie.

"The two Jackson campaigns are certainly subsumed. You'll hear people say, 'I never had a candidate that's run a campaign like Bernie's in my life.' And, when Howard Dean ran, they would always say, 'There's never been a challenge to the establishment like this one since Bobby Kennedy. I'd go, no, it wasn't. The Jackson campaign was right there—seven million votes, 1200 delegates. We won 13 states, all over the country, including Michigan. At the time we won Michigan, at the end of March in 1988, Jesse was ahead."

In 1988, Jackson ran on a platform that included a new Works Progress Administration to provide jobs and rebuild an American infrastructure that even then was perceived to be crumbling. He advocated for the Equal Rights Amendment, free community college education, a stricter enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, and a single-payer system of national health care. Not one of those proposals was included in the party platform that emerged from the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Today, with the exception of the ERA, which has been replaced somewhat in progressive politics with pay equity and family leave, not a single Democratic candidate is opposed to any of them.

The disappearance of the Jackson campaigns from the history of modern progressive politics is not an accident. By 1992, when Bill Clinton teed up Sister Souljah as a direct slap at Jackson, who was sitting not 10 feet away on the dais, the exile became complete. The Jackson campaigns—and the populist forces that were their energy—became something from which serious Democratic politicians were obliged to distance themselves. Race was soft-pedaled and class simply was not mentioned at all.

But there was a subversive, counter-establishment energy unleashed within the party that refused to be quelled. It manifested itself in the pushback against an increasingly extremist Republican party. It helped bail out Bill Clinton, who was no friend to it, when a runaway House of Representatives tried to impeach him. It arose in abandoned wrath in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, only to find that the Democratic establishment had failed and then bailed. After the attacks of 9/11, it found itself almost alone as a countervailing force in opposition to the Iraq debacle and to the human rights violations that became central to the "war" on terror. It found a voice on the Internet, and in independent political organizations. In 2004, it found a candidate in Howard Dean, whose campaign was more similar to the Jackson campaigns than any campaign that came afterwards. In 2006, after things in Iraq had gone so terribly wrong, it was the driving impetus that brought the Democrats control of both houses of Congress and a clutch of state legislatures and governorships. And, in 2008, enough of it got behind Barack Obama to make his improbable rise to the White House possible, and then to make it a reality.

This is what Bernie Sanders has tapped this time around, this old flow of counter-establishment energy that has been magnified by the frauds and crimes of the financial elites. It has been a continuous strain of activist politics, from Jesse Jackson to Bernie Sanders. The Clintons never have trusted it completely. Bill Clinton distanced himself from it in order to get elected and, in order to get re-elected, he signed bills that seemed to deny its existence at all. In 2008, it caught Hillary Rodham Clinton by surprise. Now, it seems to have tangled her up in a knot between the strategy that elected her husband, and one consonant with the mood of her party, and of a great portion of the country.

At Grand View College in Des Moines on Sunday night, Sanders held the last great rally of his Iowa campaign. It was sponsored by MoveOn.org, the progressive activist group that has become a vehicle for this energy within progressive politics. It is a quirk of history that Move On was started as an outside pressure group dedicated to derailing the Clinton impeachment. (Its original name was "Censure And Move On," an appeal for Congress to adopt a remedy short of impeachment.) Since then, it has morphed into an influential voice in Democratic circles, alternately romanced and abandoned by the party establishment, which adores the group's ability to raise money, but which ran like rabbits when the group ran an uncomplimentary ad against General David Petraeus in 2007.

"Move On members today have enormous regard for a lot of what the Clintons do and fight for and, when we poll our members, it's not an anti-Hillary sentiment, it's pro-Bernie sentiment. Move On became a place to go when you thought the Democratic party wasn't doing the job."

The rally was raucous and happy, the way all Sanders rallies are. The caucuses have become more crucial to his candidacy over the last few weeks; the perception among the elite political press that he must win here is beginning to harden, which is not fair, but which is the way that it is. But he does have something going for him, too, a history that is as rich and powerful as any conventional narrative is. "Eight years ago," he told the crowd, "you allowed a young African American senator to come here, and it doesn't matter whether you like Obama or don't like Obama, what matters is that the people of Iowa looked beyond his skin color to make their judgment, and that was revolutionary." And, in the space between the words, you could hear the echoes of another speech, given by another improbable politician, at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.

"We find common ground at the plant gate that closes on workers without notice. We find common ground at the farm auction, where a good farmer loses his or her land to bad loans or diminishing markets. Common ground at the school yard where teachers cannot get adequate pay, and students cannot get a scholarship, and can't make a loan. Common ground at the hospital admitting room, where somebody tonight is dying because they cannot afford to go upstairs to a bed that's empty waiting for someone with insurance to get sick. We are a better nation than that. We must do better. Common ground. What is leadership if not present help in a time of crisis? So I met you at the point of challenge. In Jay, Maine, where paper workers were striking for fair wages; in Greenville, Iowa, where family farmers struggle for a fair price; in Cleveland, Ohio, where working women seek comparable worth; in McFarland, California, where the children of Hispanic farm workers may be dying from poisoned land, dying in clusters with cancer; in an AIDS hospice in Houston, Texas, where the sick support one another, too often rejected by their own parents and friends."

It is a stubborn faith. But it is still there, and people ignore it at their peril.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io