Democratic Socialism. Hope or Hopeless?

9:07Doug Greene:By 1944, Roosevelt and his New Deal had gotten the country through the worst economic disaster in its history. And now was leading it towards victory in a catastrophic world war. Michael, meanwhile, too young to fight in that war, stayed in a kind of Catholic bubble all through his teen years. He went to a Jesuit all-boys high school, then College of the Holy Cross, where he took up writing for his college paper.

9:35Maurice Isserman:I came across editorials he wrote announcing birth control. This is in the late 1940s.

9:41Doug Greene:He was a believer.

9:42Maurice Isserman:He was a true believer.

9:44Doug Greene:But questions slowly started to creep into Michael's mind. Things he'd taken for granted as reality for so long. His family's politics, his faith. He even flirted with becoming a Republican in college. And when he went on to law school at Yale, he, for the first time in his life...

10:03Maurice Isserman:was suddenly not surrounded by Catholics. He actually had a Protestant girlfriend from Wellesley, which he carefully didn't mention to his mother. And he began to read much more widely.

10:14Doug Greene:He found himself gravitating towards books on philosophy, particularly those great French thinkers.

10:21Maurice Isserman:People like Albert Camus, Pascal, and others. And in addition to that, when he's at Yale, it's not a too far trip for him to go to New York, which has a bubbling kind of bohemian leftist culture at the time. And for a while, he wavered in his faith. It was torturous for him. And at one point, he basically makes the Pascalian wager, I'm going to believe because it's absurd.

10:43Doug Greene:I'm going to believe because it's absurd.

10:46Maurice Isserman:Yes.

10:47Doug Greene:Belief is a wise wager.

10:49Maurice Isserman:Granted that faith cannot be proved,

10:51Doug Greene:what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false?

10:56Maurice Isserman:If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. And he takes the plunge.

11:05Doug Greene:After just a year, with all these new existential ideas swirling in his mind, he dropped out of law school, moved to Chicago to earn a master's of literature, and then he headed to the Lower East Side of New York City.

11:19Maurice Isserman:He joins Dorothea Day's Catholic worker movement.

11:23Doug Greene:If they were hungry, feed them. If they were without clothes, find clothes for them. If they need a place to stay, find some shelter for them. Dorothy Day co-founded a radical social justice movement known as the Catholic Workers during the Great Depression.

11:37Maurice Isserman:She had actually been around the Socialist and Communist parties early in her life, returns to the church, and basically she works with the poor. By the 1950s, the population being served in the soup kitchens at the Catholic Worker tended to be a different kind of poor.

11:54Doug Greene:While some were living the white picket fence middle-class dream, the Catholic workers were spending every day with this different kind of poor.

12:02Maurice Isserman:Broken men, many with addictions, many alcoholics, whose poverty can be explained in terms of individual failings.

12:12Doug Greene:The Catholic workers believed they could change the world by saving one broken man at a time and getting that message out through a newspaper they distributed nationwide. Michael spent his days immersed in this world of poverty.

12:26Maurice Isserman:Living in the Catholic worker house, along with the poor of the Lower East Side, working in their soup kitchen. He said it was the most left-wing you could be in the Catholic church.

12:37Doug Greene:One of his fellow Catholic workers remembered him as being sympathetic towards the people coming in, but said he struggled to understand and communicate with them.

12:47Maurice Isserman:And the Catholic worker, he was known as the guy with the typewriter.

12:50Doug Greene:Michael much preferred to spend his days sitting at that typewriter, writing articles for the Catholic Worker newspaper.

12:56Maurice Isserman:Had a circulation in the high 50 ,000s, you know, more than the nation or the New Republic at the time.

13:03Doug Greene:He wrote about what he witnessed every day on the streets of New York City.

13:08Maurice Isserman:He said, you know, there are a lot more poor people than most Americans think. Since he's a very articulate and intelligent man, he speaks for the movement, he travels around.

13:16Doug Greene:And he started to meet different people across the political spectrum, including...

13:21Maurice Isserman:William F. Buckley, the famous American conservative. Buckley's very impressed by him. But he also encounters members of the Socialist Party. And they give him literature to read. Marx, Lenin, people like that. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a word to win.

13:48Doug Greene:After a couple of years with the Catholic workers, he just couldn't seem to shake those doubts he'd stuffed down.

13:54Maurice Isserman:By 1952, returned to his crisis of faith and finally left the church. But he never lost that, I think, really profound moral basis.

14:07Doug Greene:He would later write in his book, The Politics at God's Funeral, Believers and unbelievers have the same enemy, the humdrum nihilism of everyday life in much of Western society.

14:19Maurice Isserman:He likes this idea of people living for something transcendent, something bigger than themselves.

14:28Doug Greene:Having left the Catholic workers, Michael, at 24 years old, was untethered, unsure what would come next. And all that literature the Socialist Party gave him, he couldn't seem to get it out of his head.

14:40Maurice Isserman:One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many.

14:46Doug Greene:Thing is, the early 50s wasn't exactly the best time to be getting involved in leftist movements.

14:52Maurice Isserman:This is the height of McCarthyism.

14:54Doug Greene:The Cold War was underway. Anyone seen as too red, too communist, or anything that resembled it was a target.

15:02Maurice Isserman:There was still a kind of critical mass of mostly young people. And when he left the Catholic worker, he moved immediately into that circle. So he was changing one radical perspective, which was very individualistic, into another radical perspective that was much more collectively oriented.

15:24Doug Greene:But Michael was new to this world and trying to figure out what brand of radical he was and what his new North Star should be. Then he meets a guy named Max Schachman, a leader in the socialism scene. Schachman was an immigrant from the Russian Empire, a one-time fan of Soviet communism who grew disillusioned because of the targeting of dissent.

15:46Maurice Isserman:Schachman is like, it's a new evil empire, and we can't support it.

15:51Doug Greene:Schachman realigned to a new worldview, democratic socialism, a political philosophy that had been around in some form since the 1800s. For Shackman, it meant being anti-authoritarian, anti-communist, and pro-economic equality. And as he saw it, quote, the highest attainment of democracy lies in socialism. And by the same token, the road to socialism lies in the highest fulfillment of democracy.

16:19Maurice Isserman:They see themselves as aligned with the West.

16:23Doug Greene:It's like it's a patriotic socialism.

16:25Maurice Isserman:Yes. And Harrington is actually very explicit about that. He says at one point in the late 50s, you can't be a socialist without loving America.

16:34Doug Greene:What a line, right? You can't be a socialist without loving America.

16:39Maurice Isserman:Does that mean you're just going to whitewash the crimes of the American government and imperialism?

16:46Doug Greene:By the mid-1950s, Michael was sure about a few things. God probably didn't exist. Communism was bad. Poverty was a problem in America. and socialism was the path to fixing it. All of this was very much still hypothetical to him, a thought experiment. But that would soon change. Coming up...

17:10Maurice Isserman:He became very much a believer in the positive role that the state, the government, could play.

17:17Doug Greene:Michael Harrington tests the limits of what's possible.

17:25Maurice Isserman:Hi, this is Regina from Washington, D.C. You're listening to ThruLine with NPR.

17:51Maurice Isserman:You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today.

17:57Doug Greene:Hey, what's your problem? No, seriously. Are your grocery bills too high?

18:02Maurice Isserman:Are you spending too much time on your phone?

18:04Doug Greene:Maybe you're searching for a new job, or you're trying to figure out how to set boundaries with your family. Whatever's on your mind, LifeKit has you covered with three episodes every week on health, money, mental health, and so much more. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:22Maurice Isserman:On NPR's Wildcard podcast, journalist John Dickerson says you can't have belief without doubt. Your faith has to be sifted and sorted and knocked around by doubt. Watch or listen to that Wildcard conversation on the NPR app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:51Maurice Isserman:Part 2, The Man Who Discovered Poverty Let me say first that I accept the nomination of the Democratic Party.

19:01Doug Greene:On July 15, 1960, looking out at a crowd of 80 ,000, John F. Kennedy accepted the nomination to be the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party in that year's election.

19:14Maurice Isserman:The obligation to devote every effort of my mind and spirit.

19:18Doug Greene:Michael Harrington was there. Sort of. He was standing just outside the convention, alongside 5 ,000 other civil rights activists, picketing, demanding a stronger civil rights plank in the Democratic Party.

19:31Maurice Isserman:— He's really running against Mr. Nixon.

19:36Doug Greene:— Harrington had grown up with a romanticized view of the Confederacy, shaped in part by Gone with the Wind, a big hit when he was a kid. He told a reporter once, I used to think that the slaves really liked it under slavery.

19:56Doug Greene:But years of living in New York, witnessing poverty, opened his eyes to just how bad the situation was for Black Americans in particular, and helped build the bridge in his mind between economic welfare and social justice. Harrington got more and more involved in the movement, organizing sit-ins and marches, and eventually, a protest outside the DNC. And we stand today on the edge of a new frontier. Standing in the crowd alongside him were heavy hitters of the movement. Roy Wilkins, Marion Barry, and of course, Martin Luther King Jr.

20:33Maurice Isserman:He had met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1960 at the Democratic National Convention.

20:39Doug Greene:Harrington had actually been assigned to pick up King from the airport the day before the convention and take him to his hotel.

20:46Maurice Isserman:He said he was very moved to realize that King was actually a year younger than he was.

20:50Doug Greene:They talked for hours. And at one point, King asked him if he should endorse JFK. Harrington said no, that he couldn't advise anyone to back what he called a bourgeois candidate. King appears to have voted for JFK in the end. Harrington wrote in Norman Thomas' name, a longtime leader in the Socialist Party. But by the time the next election rolled around four years later, Harrington would not only be voting blue, he would have a seat inside the White House, all thanks to a best-selling book he publishes in 1962.

21:24Maurice Isserman:The Other America.

21:26Doug Greene:The Other America.

21:29Maurice Isserman:Most Americans have just known a time of good food, presents, and family. They probably think that's the way all Americans live, but it's not true. Tens of millions of Americans are poor, miserable, in body and in spirit. The other America's origins were in a couple of articles that Mike wrote for Commentary magazine, at the time a very liberal magazine, today a very conservative magazine. Articles that saw Mike do a deep dive into the U.S. Census to make an argument that poverty was much more widespread that most people assume. You'll see people saying, like, the United States has overcome poverty.

22:18Maurice Isserman:They tended to talk about it in terms that minimized its extent, pockets of poverty.

22:26Doug Greene:Harrington found that the reality was twofold. Yes, government programs and unions have lifted millions out of poverty. But that progress...

22:35Maurice Isserman:...was distributed unequally, certainly racially unequally. The different groups that he looked at That included African Americans. Who work at 58 % of the white wage. Native Americans. It was unusual at that time to talk about Native American poverty. Hispanic Americans. There are farm workers. There are workers in the coal fields whose jobs have been destroyed by automation. The elderly. Who are not only poor in income, but who are sick, who are living alone.

23:06Doug Greene:He believes that poverty constitutes a separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life.

23:13Maurice Isserman:Somewhere between a quarter and a third, depending on how you count it, of the American population fell below the officially established poverty line.

23:24Doug Greene:And he proposes a solution. The federal government should launch a, quote, comprehensive assault on poverty and urges that, quote, housing, schools, medical care, labor standards, communal institutions must be combined in a broad-planned program.

23:42Maurice Isserman:He wrote The Other America to stir the conscience of individual Americans, but also to make the argument that only the federal government could really make a difference. You couldn't rely on just being personally philanthropic or an expanding economy to create equality. He says the New Deal was the last time the United States had really tried to do this, to tackle poverty. So we not only need that again, but we need like a moral crusade for America.

24:15Doug Greene:And he had a particular reader in mind.

24:18Maurice Isserman:The Other America was not a book written for poor people. That is to say, he didn't have to convince poor people that they were poor. They knew that. Who he was writing for was the middle class American who assumed that they were living in an affluent society. Those are the people who wield disproportionate political clout. You know, traditionally, Marxist, socialist, communist, they think the way to overcome these conditions is for the working class, the poor people, the masses, to organize, use their collective strength to win reforms and create a new society. He does not see that at all as the path.

24:58Maurice Isserman:These benevolent rulers, enlightened liberals, they're the people who are essentially going to deliver things.

25:07Doug Greene:When the other America was released, crickets.

25:11Maurice Isserman:At first, this book could have just fallen through the cracks. No one would read it.

25:15Doug Greene:But a little less than a year later, a New Yorker book critic writes a 13 ,000-word glowing review of it, the longest book review the magazine had ever run.

25:25Maurice Isserman:There is a monotony about the injustices suffered by the poor that perhaps accounts for the lack of interest the rest of society shows in them. Everything seems to go wrong with them. They never win.

25:38Doug Greene:It's just boring. The review outlines, in no uncertain terms, just how bad the situation is. The worst part of being old and poor in this country is the loneliness.

25:50Maurice Isserman:So this actually gets the book to sell well.

25:52Doug Greene:Now, everyone was talking about it.

25:55Maurice Isserman:He was suddenly being invited as a speaker around the country.

25:59Doug Greene:Students on college campuses were especially drawn to him. He was in his 30s by now, a little older than them, but still able to speak their language. They were building a movement called the New Left.

26:12Maurice Isserman:And he was regarded as a close and welcome advisor. We didn't use jargon.

26:17Doug Greene:No mention of the proletariat or the masses.

26:20Maurice Isserman:He wasn't trying to bully you and make you feel guilty. He's conveying this very sincere, morally driven commitment to improving the lives of people who were at the bottom.

26:32Doug Greene:And pretty soon, people were calling him...

26:34Maurice Isserman:The man who discovered poverty. This is the situation room. I read you. Go ahead. Give me all available information on President. Over.

26:45Doug Greene:Meanwhile, the country was reeling from the assassination of President Kennedy.

26:49Maurice Isserman:At 2.38 in the forward cabin of Air Force One, a necessary ceremony. Which catapulted his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, into the presidency. Johnson was an immensely complicated man, intensely ambitious.

27:05Doug Greene:He'd grown up near poverty in Texas, taught poorer Mexican-American children, and deeply admired FDR. He wanted to accomplish what Roosevelt hadn't, an interracial democracy with prosperity for all people.

27:18Maurice Isserman:In an odd way, Michael Harrington was an ally for a brief moment with Lyndon Johnson. They wanted some of the same things.

27:28Doug Greene:One day, Harrington gets a call from a Johnson aide who says...

27:32Maurice Isserman:Come down for consultation in Washington about this legislation that Lyndon Johnson is going to announce at the end of January in a State of the Union address. He's very excited. Like, this is someone who, until the other America, didn't really have steady unemployment. So Harrington goes down and spends several weeks in these high-level consultations. He's kind of amazed when they're throwing around the numbers of what they can do on this program and that program.

27:59Doug Greene:We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars.

28:02Maurice Isserman:This random Greenwich Village socialist is, you know, suddenly rubbing elbows with chief strategists within the New Johnson administration.

28:13Doug Greene:And he called himself a socialist, right? They knowingly invited a socialist.

28:17Maurice Isserman:They knowingly invited a socialist. I mean, they didn't, like, issue a press release saying, oh, Michael Harrington, the well-known notorious socialist is helping shape this legislation, but they weren't afraid of it.

28:28Doug Greene:And not long after these meetings, in January 1964, LBJ announced his war on poverty to the world. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. That year, Harrington voted for LBJ in the presidential election. He now had a front row seat to power and made some tangible impact. And although he's still a leader in the Socialist Party, his thinking has shifted. Maybe the only real path to change in America is to work from within the system.

29:09Maurice Isserman:We're not going to influence policy or get anywhere politically by running independent campaigns. We've been trying to do that for the past century. It's a dead end.

29:19Doug Greene:He argued that the goal should be to realign the Democratic Party.

29:24Maurice Isserman:That was the term used, realignment.

29:26Doug Greene:Bring new voters, especially Black voters, into the party and push white Southern Democrats out of the party.

29:34Maurice Isserman:Who've been blocking particularly civil rights legislation, but lots of other progressive legislation for a generation.

29:41Doug Greene:Harrington sees the student movement, the civil rights movement, the workers movement.

29:45Maurice Isserman:Having the potential for building a new leftist majority within the Democratic Party, which he definitely sees as a possibility by 1964 and 1965.

29:56Doug Greene:By 1965, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had passed. The war on poverty was underway, and Harrington was in the Johnson administration's inner circle.

30:06Maurice Isserman:It must have seemed to him like a tremendously hopeful moment. You know, even a half decade earlier would have been almost impossible to imagine.

30:22Maurice Isserman:Firing line with William F. Buckley Jr. Tonight, a war on poverty. Hope or hopeless?

30:33Doug Greene:Harrington was launched into the public eye, becoming an unofficial spokesperson for the White House.

30:39Maurice Isserman:Harrington is actually the first guest on Buckley's Firing Line when it premieres in the 60s, talking about the Great Society programs.

30:48Doug Greene:By this point, William F. Buckley was one of the most influential conservatives in America. And Firing Line offered a unique place on American television where politicians, academics, writers and activists from all different views could engage in intense debate. Everyone from Muhammad Ali to Margaret Thatcher to Mother Teresa would eventually be a guest. So it was a big deal that Harrington was the very first.

31:14Maurice Isserman:How do you define poverty for purposes of the poverty program? Well, it's not how I define it, it's how the government does. I'm more interested in your definition. Okay, mine's the government's, because it's become very precise. The government usually does what you tell it. Oh, not at all.

31:29Doug Greene:This idea of the other America that Harrington had released into the world, it spread.

31:35Maurice Isserman:The other America.

31:37Doug Greene:Even finding its way into the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.

31:55Maurice Isserman:Martin Luther King used a joke with him, you know, Mike, we didn't know we were poor until we read your book.

32:04Doug Greene:After their first meeting on the eve of the DNC, Harrington had grown closer to King, becoming…

32:10Maurice Isserman:entrusted advisor. He met with King at various places in the South.

32:16Doug Greene:Do you think MLK would have called himself a Democratic Socialist?

32:20Maurice Isserman:MLK did call himself a Democratic Socialist. He just didn't do it outside of, you know, close personal and political circles. It was bad enough that he was, you know, this radical Black agitator. He didn't need to be a radical Black red agitator.

32:34Doug Greene:But by 1967, King's rhetoric was becoming more forceful, some might say more radical, on poverty.

32:41Maurice Isserman:Organizing a poor people's campaign.

32:43Doug Greene:King and Harrington were on the same page about that. But there started to be friction between them when King started publicly speaking out about another glaring issue of the time, the Vietnam War.

32:57Maurice Isserman:There comes a time when silence is betrayal. He's condemning the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. And he criticized himself. He said this was troubling his conscience that he had toned down what he really believed in the hopes of retaining communication with the White House.

33:20Doug Greene:The same White House that had pushed the war on poverty and passed the Civil Rights Act was also dropping bombs on poor people, innocent people, thousands of miles away. Harrington, also a pacifist, made a different choice, a compromise. He felt that if he spoke out too directly, too loudly,

33:44Maurice Isserman:he would lose whatever influence he had in the Johnson administration.

33:48Doug Greene:But Harrington would soon discover there was also a cost to not speaking out. That's coming up.

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34:45Doug Greene:If the creation of the universe was translated into music, what would it sound like?

34:56Doug Greene:Ideas about how to make sense of the incomprehensible.

35:00Maurice Isserman:Most of science in general is actually intuitable.

35:04Doug Greene:That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash switch. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Part 3. The Left Wing of the Possible

35:34Maurice Isserman:Seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

35:41Doug Greene:In 1968, Walter Cronkite was the most famous and trusted news anchor in America. So it was a political earthquake when he went on air in February of that year and basically said, why are we still in Vietnam? We aren't winning. It's time to get out. The war was nearly a decade old by this point. But 1968 was an especially bad year. Night after night, scenes from the front lines beam into American living rooms.

36:16Maurice Isserman:Bloodied American soldiers, Vietnamese women and children,

36:20Doug Greene:maimed, displaced, killed.

36:23Maurice Isserman:Now they have nothing but one good meal a day.

36:31Maurice Isserman:Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

36:36Doug Greene:Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking out.

36:38Maurice Isserman:If I'm going to die, I'll die now, right here fighting you.

36:41Doug Greene:Muhammad Ali was speaking out, casting the war as part of their same struggle.

36:45Maurice Isserman:You my enemy. My enemy's the white people, not Vietcans or Chinese or Japanese. You my opposing when I'm on freedom.

36:57Doug Greene:Even Mick Jagger was singing about revolution.

37:01Maurice Isserman:You see an explosion of the student movement engaged in, like, street fighting, mass protests.

37:10Doug Greene:But one voice was noticeably absent.

37:16Doug Greene:Michael Harrington.

37:20Doug Greene:By 1968, Harrington was chairman of the Socialist Party of America. And a lot of the young activists who had looked up to him for years don't know what to make of his silence. I shall not seek, and I will not accept,

37:38Maurice Isserman:the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

37:42Doug Greene:It was an election year. LBJ had already decided not to run for re-election. even before two assassinations rocked the country.

37:50Maurice Isserman:The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis tonight. In the Ambassador Hotel last night, Senator Kennedy was shot. This upsets the political establishment in many respects and opens up the Democratic Party to different candidates.

38:04Doug Greene:And on college campuses, students were pushing hard for the anti-war candidate, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy.

38:12Maurice Isserman:How many men must die to justify some 23 ,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands?

38:20Doug Greene:In the end, Harrington chose to back LBJ's vice president, Hubert Humphrey.

38:25Maurice Isserman:Who is pro-war.

38:27Doug Greene:A position many students and activists find unconscionable. To them, supporting a candidate who wouldn't condemn the war, Democrat or not, meant sacrificing the moral foundation they stood on.

38:38Maurice Isserman:Pretty much the only excuse that Harrington has is, well, he's not a Republican.

38:43Doug Greene:Harrington calculated it this way. Humphrey, he believed, had the best chance of defeating the Republican challenger, Richard Nixon. And Humphrey was the lesser of two evils. So while it wasn't ideal, he was the best option they had. In the end, Humphrey was chosen as the Democratic candidate.

39:02Maurice Isserman:I was 17 in 1968. I was outraged. I didn't see voting for someone like Hubert Humphrey as at all acceptable.

39:11Doug Greene:Morris Sisserman was then part of SDS, Students for Democratic Society, the main student activist group of the era.

39:19Maurice Isserman:Ultimately, Hubert Humphrey doesn't win.

39:21Doug Greene:As for Harrington, a lot of the students brand him a sellout.

39:25Maurice Isserman:He wasn't even on my radar screen anymore, precisely because he wasn't standing up, you know, at these big anti-war rallies and adding his voice to ours. SDS is going to move to basically being openly Marxist-Leninist within a short time. This is foreign to Harrington. He's really not liking this. He wants to build a new majority within the Democratic Party. And he sees all of this as destructive, ultra-leftism, sectarian. I think he faced a genuine dilemma.

39:55Doug Greene:A dilemma that would follow Harrington for the rest of his life. How much should you compromise to build political power? And at what point does the compromise become the politics? The 1970s would test his resolve and that commitment to compromise. Republicans in the White House, a conservative Supreme Court, the Vietnam War dragging on until 1975. And this movement of the new left, pushing against the status quo, started to fray at the edges, losing so much of the momentum it had built in the 1960s. And the Socialist Party completely fell apart.

40:31Maurice Isserman:I watched the organization tear itself apart in a frenzy of sectarian conflict.

40:39Doug Greene:Long story short, Harrington, who was the chairman of the Socialist Party, finally comes out against the war after Nixon, a Republican, takes office. Coincidence? Probably not.

40:51Maurice Isserman:I agree. It's not a coincidence. And you also have a lot of people in the political establishment are like, we got to pull out.

40:57Doug Greene:But some in the Socialist Party pushed back, including Harrington's old mentor, Max Schachman. To them, defeating communism was the most important thing, even if it meant supporting Nixon. So they basically divorced. Each guy started his own new socialist group. Harrington called his, DSOC.

41:17Maurice Isserman:The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. Let me begin with a crack by, famous remark by Will Rogers. I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat.

41:33Doug Greene:Harrington was basically starting from scratch again, trying to build a democratic socialist movement, which advocated for socialism at home and peace abroad. But now his North Star was the Democratic Party.

41:46Maurice Isserman:He thinks, OK, all these, the anti-war movement and other movements, we want to basically give them a place to go.

41:53Doug Greene:He had a kind of epiphany. the left wing of the possible. That's what this new progressive movement needed, he believed, to push the Democratic Party towards a better future. And he started getting the word out.

42:07Maurice Isserman:I had heard him speak on a number of occasions in the 1970s, and I was looking for reasons to disagree with him.

42:16Doug Greene:Morris remembers being in the crowd feeling skeptical, like there's no way this guy is going to win me over.

42:23Maurice Isserman:He would always, at the start of a speech, say, I have three points I want to make. It was always three points. First of all... He always held his speeches down to about a half hour. Pascal talks about the necessity of making a wager on God. I would argue, somewhat analogous, that there's no way to prove that socialism is right. I think we take questions.

42:44Doug Greene:One night, Morris decided to ask the question that had been bothering him since 1968.

42:50Maurice Isserman:I asked in a hostile tone, should you have supported Hubert Humphrey? And he said, yeah, I mean, explain why.

42:57Doug Greene:Morris still disagreed. But now he could understand the murkiness of it all more. He'd seen what a Nixon presidency had wrought. And more than anything, Harrington just seemed real to him. Like he really was grappling with the right thing to do.

43:11Maurice Isserman:So that helped make me a Michael Harrington socialist.

43:17Doug Greene:And that's how the teenager who had sworn off Harrington for being too willing to compromise now found himself becoming one of the first members of a new group formed by Harrington in 1982 called the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA.

43:37Doug Greene:The DSA brought together Harrington's DSAC and another group called NAM, the New American Movement, which had absorbed some of the former New Left activists, now in their early 30s, under one umbrella.

43:49Maurice Isserman:It's unusual on the left for mergers to take place.

43:53Doug Greene:Before merging, they did have to resolve one big disagreement.

43:57Maurice Isserman:Some of them are a bit more pro-Palestinian than Harrington is. Harrington was a Zionist. He actually knew by heart the lyrics to the Israeli national anthem. And he had supported the 67 war, the 73 war. And as part of the Social Center National, he knew members of the Israeli Labor Party.

44:16Doug Greene:And the Palestinian question, how did he view that?

44:21Maurice Isserman:I mean, he eventually came to more a two-state solution, but he definitely put the onus more on the Palestinians to reach an accommodation. He saw the Israelis as the wrong party in all of this.

44:33Doug Greene:The more pro-Palestinian NAM members eventually moved past that because...

44:38Maurice Isserman:The key issue for them was getting rid of Reagan. Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

44:50Doug Greene:This was the 1980s. The Republican president, Ronald Reagan, was pro-free market capitalism and military interventions abroad and against unions and government programs. And that neoliberal free market ethos was quickly spreading into the Democratic Party, too, which was looking to win back corporate donors and suburban voters. The stakes felt high, and Harrington offered the movement something the left rarely had, access.

45:19Maurice Isserman:Harrington was someone who could be invited to go speak before the National Convention of the United Auto Workers.

45:26Doug Greene:And he regularly appeared on NPR. Michael Harrington is best known for his book The Other America,

45:33Maurice Isserman:which was one of the weapons used in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. He explains why in this country, socialism has been more of an influence than a political reality. First and perhaps foremost to my mind is the fact that America has the most heterogeneous working class in the world. So millions of people knew him.

45:54Doug Greene:He was radical enough to challenge what Americans thought was possible, but moderate enough to stay a part of the mainstream conversation. But the DSA was still a very tiny organization, peaking around 8 ,000 members in the 80s. And although Harrington considered them the left wing of the possible, a lot of people looking to go even further left were gravitating towards a different movement.

46:18Maurice Isserman:Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the business person, the environmentalist, the peace activist, The young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt. Harrington thought that Jesse Jackson was a little too militant, maybe a little too soft on communism at times.

46:43Doug Greene:Harrington had protested for civil rights alongside Jackson during the 60s. But he thought Jackson was too far left to actually win. When given the choice, Harrington often chose the more centrist option among the Democratic contenders.

46:57Maurice Isserman:And that's the thing with the realignment strategy. It always amounts to sacrificing any organization to stay within the Democratic Party tent, which was Harrington's overriding objective.

47:07Doug Greene:But Harrington did end up backing Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential run.

47:12Maurice Isserman:I think that Harrington was speaking at some of Jackson's campaign events by then.

47:16Doug Greene:By then, so many of the things Harrington had spent his life fighting for seemed to be further out of reach than they'd been when he first got involved in politics. Reaganomics was winning. Capitalism seemed more dominant than ever. The Democrats were transforming into the party of corporations, leaving FDR and the New Deal behind. And the conversation around poverty was, well, just listen to Reagan's 1988 State of the Union address.

47:43Maurice Isserman:Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.

47:49Doug Greene:Reagan might not have even known it. That feels like a real kind of attack on Harrington and his life's work.

47:59Maurice Isserman:Yeah, and it was untrue.

48:01Doug Greene:Morris says statistics showed poverty declining dramatically in the 1960s with the war on poverty. But Republican policies that hollowed out American manufacturing and weakened the labor movement undid a lot of that progress.

48:15Maurice Isserman:So poverty got a second chance, but it wasn't the fault of the war on poverty.

48:21Doug Greene:Harrington died in 1989 at age 61 after a battle with esophageal cancer. Less than two years later, a little-known mayor from Vermont named Bernie Sanders was elected to Congress.

48:35Maurice Isserman:Harrington was asked close to his death by an inquiring reporter what he would say to God if it turns out, you know, there is a heaven, which by that point he didn't believe.

48:46Doug Greene:Harrington's response?

48:47Maurice Isserman:He would ask God why he mumbled. That is why he didn't get his message across more clearly.

48:57Doug Greene:For decades after his death, Harrington was remembered as the man who discovered poverty. In 1998, Time magazine even named The Other America as one of the 10 most influential books of the 20th century to be published anywhere in the world. The DSA, meanwhile, was pretty dormant, a footnote in Harrington's story. That is, until 2015, when Bernie Sanders gripped the lectern at Georgetown University and said the words,

49:26Maurice Isserman:Democratic socialism.

49:28Doug Greene:Morris Iserman says while Sanders deserves credit for reviving interests in Harrington's DSA, the seeds had been planted earlier.

49:36Maurice Isserman:I think a new openness to questioning capitalism begins with the economic crisis of 2008, which is Barack Obama's election, with new social movements emerging horizontally through social media spread, particularly among the young, like Occupy Wall Street in 2011. there is this feeling that the system is not working. You know, I call myself a democratic socialist in many ways inspired by the words of Dr. King from decades ago, who said, call it democracy or call it democratic socialism, there has to be a better distribution of wealth for all of God's children in this country.

50:21Doug Greene:Echoes of the questions and battles that Harrington faced can be heard all around us today. It's hard to know what Harrington would make of today's DSA. and its most vocal supporters like Zoran Mamdani, especially when it comes to one of the biggest issues driving the movement right now, Israel-Palestine. A statement on its website reads, quote, DSA stands for the full freedoms and self-determination of the Palestinian people, including the end of Israel's colonization and occupation of all Arab lands, and goes on to say, our role is to end U.S. complicity in Israel's genocide and apartheid at every level.

51:00Maurice Isserman:We can't speak for him from the grave. I'd like to think he would have changed his mind in some fundamental ways. He might not be happy with DSA's official position, maximalist position, which forbids even the membership to liberal Zionists. But would he be cheering on the assault on Gaza? That I very much doubt. He changed dramatically in the course of his lifetime. And I imagine if he stayed with us for another four decades, he would have continued to change.

51:33Doug Greene:Harrington held on to the belief that in the long run, the Democratic Party could change too.

51:39Maurice Isserman:But it's also based on a faulty premise. Because for Harrington, he thinks the Democrats are a collection of more or less equal interest groups. Civil rights, labor, students, big business, etc. etc. When that's not the case, the Democrats are actually a party of Wall Street, party of big business and war. I think Harringtonism is actually a cautionary tale of what not to do. It may be helpful in building a constituency in the Democratic Party, but for casting off capitalism, I don't think very much. Harrington's second autobiography was titled The Long Distance runner. And he meant that this is a lifetime commitment and you don't expect everything's going to change immediately.

52:29I mean, if there is a heaven, you know, I can see him up there on the

52:33Maurice Isserman:left coast of heaven, you know, kind of smiling down on Zoran and on the New York City chapter of DSA and on AOC because they really represent his vision of a left wing of the possible. The American people, I believe, are going to wake up and understand that the dream is over, the house of cards has collapsed. Will the left be able to take advantage of the moment?

53:15Doug Greene:That's it for this week's show. Coming up next week, dinosaurs, Carl Sagan, and nuclear war. The story of the last time we avoided the end of the world. Don't miss it. ThruLine was created by me and Ramtin Adabloui. This episode was produced by me and... Julia Redpath. Molly Marcello.

53:37Maurice Isserman:Sarah Wyman. Amy Padula. Liana Semstrom

53:41Doug Greene:Irene Noguchi This episode was fact-checked by Kevin Vocal. It was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music by Ramtin Adablui and his band, Drop Electric. Thanks also to Tom Pyle, Florian Hertel, Spencer Wetzel, Yulisse Gosset, Antoine Trogler, Johannes Dergy, and Josie Gettle. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard, call 872-588-8805 and leave a voicemail. Don't forget to tell us your name, where you're calling from, and please say, you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Thanks for listening. This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology, hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book, How to Change.

54:31Doug Greene:Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, historians, authors, athletes, and more about why people do the things they do. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen.

54:49Maurice Isserman:Some groups have been sounding the alarm about AI safety for years. But in the last few months, something changed. The conversation has just shifted so quickly away from we don't even know if this is real to, okay, what are we going to do about this? AI hacks, rogue agents, calls for regulation. We unpack it all on Shortwave. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.