Michael Harrington is Spinning in His Grave

Harrington speaking at a Socialist International Congress in Vancouver, 1978 – Public Domain

Most of you will not know who Michael Harrington was.   Or why he should be spinning.  Let me explain.

He was the founder of the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982 and its leader until he died in 1989.  But any comparison between the DSA he created and what is now getting headlines for shaking up the Democratic Party is tenuous at best, and the difference between what he championed and what this younger cohort of amateurs puts forth is a great chasm whose winds are doing the graveyard gyrations.

I knew Mike.  He was a close friend and traveling companion; he married one of my college colleagues, and for ten years I watched him up close as he tried to make socialism a part of the American political system.

The essential element of Mike’s politics in the 1960’s and ‘70’s was anti-Communism, and no one would have thought for a moment to call the Democratic Socialists “Communists,” as Trump has taken to doing. The whole socialist tradition in America was to shun the Communist experience in the Soviet Union, denounce Stalinism, and put forth a vision of a democratically elected government that would be like those of the Scandinavian countries, providing state services in health, education, housing and the like while preserving some capitalist enterprises to provide the taxes to pay for it all.

That was why Mike founded the DSA in 1982 and was its National Cochairman, and chief spokesman, until his death in 1989. Nowhere stuff about ending capitalism, doing away with the Presidency and the Supreme Court, gouging billionaires, everything-free-and-not-having-to-work, not even state-run groceries. The original Democratic Socialists strove, as  Mike once put it, “to be on the left wing of the possible,” and that generally meant working within the Democratic Party.  Where indeed Mike had some influence, particularly in the 1960’s when his book on the poor in the U.S., The Other America, influenced the Democrats’ emerging War on Poverty.

That DSA was never a large organization, having maybe 6,000 members in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.  What changed was the Presidential campaign of 2016, when Bernie Sanders, a leading DSA figure and its only representative in Congress, began having great success in attracting young voters new to the idea of socialism and making of it pretty much whatever they wanted government to do for them. The DSA has grown to some 120,000 members today and looks to have a real influence in this fall’s elections.

But it is no longer anything that could be called democratic or socialist, and it has stood on its head the principles that Mike and his colleagues stood for.

 It refused to support Kamala Harris in the last election; the DSA under Mike actively supported George McGovern in the 1972 election because he feared a Nixon presidency.

It issued a weak disapproval of Hamas for its 2023 massacres; Mike was an outspoken champion of the new Israel.

It has become outspokenly anti-Western in policy with Sanders; the original DSA was part of the Socialist International with social democratic parties in Germany, Sweden, France, and England.

Its leaders have vowed to do away with capitalism; the original DSA knew that capitalism was the economic engine that created the economy but that it needed to be supplemented with a welfare state on the Nordic model.

I don’t think these new DSAers can possibly have any serious influence in the months ahead.  They will win a few mayoralties around and some seats in Congress this fall, and their little bloc in the House will keep causing trouble for the Democratic leadership.  But their politics is so far from mainstream America that they will soon not even interest the suppliant media, and talk of socialism will go back into the backrooms where it has always lurked.

But poor Mike.  Spinning.  Not that DSA.