Democratic Socialism. Hope or Hopeless?

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is having a big moment. Its candidates and its membership are both surging. Before Zohran Mamdani and AOC, there was its founder, Michael Harrington, a.k.a 'the man who discovered poverty.' In this episode, we dig into Harrington’s evolution from devout Catholic to revolutionary socialist to Democratic party loyalist, and ask: did his push to compromise delay the dream or pave the way for it? Guests: Maurice Isserman, Professor of History at Hamilton College and author of The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington. Doug Greene, author of A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for dirty air and water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on. Because it's not political, it's fundamental. Learn more at S E L C dot org.

• 0:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Georgetown University, November 19th, 2015.

• 0:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hundreds of eager students wait under umbrellas as rain comes pouring down. Some have been there for hours already. All of them are hoping for a spot inside the auditorium. Finally, the doors open. The room quickly fills up. And those who don't get in stand outside the room, a line stretching down the hall, just for a chance to hear the muffled voice of a presidential candidate from Vermont.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Thank you all for being out on this beautiful day.

• 1:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Bernie Sanders stands at the wooden lectern for more than an hour. He talks about things we've now reflexively come to associate with him: income inequality, campaign finance reform, single payer health care. And he sums up his vision for the future of the Democratic Party with two words: democratic socialism.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  So let me take this opportunity to define for you what democratic socialism means to me. It means building on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans.

• 1:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's a safe bet to say most Americans listening to Sanders speak had never heard the term before.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  If you just type in Google, like, democratic socialism in America, DSA is going to come up.

• 1:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  DSA, a political advocacy group. It's short for the Democratic Socialists of America.

• 2:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  When Sanders gave that speech, the DSA only had 6,000 members.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  The average age was, my generation, it was 60-something.

• 2:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  Bernie Sanders, by the way, wasn't then and isn't now a member of the DSA. But some of those people Googling start to join. Even more join after Donald Trump wins in 2016.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  For a lot of people, especially just getting into political scene, they don't think the, quote unquote, mainstream Democrats are that oppositional, and they think DSA offers a better way to do that.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  It provides a vehicle into which all of these new, eager, young recruits are drawn.

• 2:51Speaker 04

  This bill is a deal with the devil.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

• 2:57Speaker 04

  President Trump, you're either being lied to, or you are lying to the American people.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Bada Mi.

• 3:05Speaker 05

  My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  The organization expanded dramatically and recently topped 120,000 members, which makes it numerically the largest socialist organization in the history of the American left ever.

• 3:24Speaker 06

  Democratic socialists are celebrating another win in a key US congressional primary ahead of the midterm.

• 3:29Speaker 07

  The barbarians are in the game. We will defeat the communists. This is all part of an internal fight within the Democratic Party.

• 3:36Speaker 08

  This is political suicide times 10.

• 3:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  The DSA has made headlines a lot in the decades since Bernie Sanders uttered those two words. But the organization is not new. It's been around since the early 1980s, founded by a guy named Michael Harrington several years before he died. In his lifetime, Harrington was considered...

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Probably the most well-known socialist in the United States.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  He was Mr. Socialism.

• 4:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Then and now, being labeled socialist in America comes with a lot of strings attached.

• 4:13Speaker 09

  You start where you can start. If I had designed American society, I think I would have designed it much more left-wing than it is. But I have to deal with the society as it is.

• 4:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  Harrington spent years trying to figure out how to market socialist ideas to an American audience and move the Democratic Party closer to that vision.

• 4:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah, and on this episode of Throughline from NPR, we're diving into the story of Michael Harrington, his complicated evolution from devout Catholic to revolutionary socialist to Democratic Party loyalist. And we'll ask the question that followed him throughout his life: is compromise necessary to change the world, or does it limit what the world can be? Stay with us.

• 5:10Speaker 10

  This is Brian Gwynne from Cincinnati, Ohio, and you're listening to Throughline on NPR.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 5:23Speaker 11

  In a midterm election, it's hard to keep track of all those small down ballot races. So some voters are using AI chatbots to figure out who to support. Sometimes if you push back to hallucinations, the chatbot will confess that it made something up, but in other cases, you know, it will double down. What you should know about using AI for election research. Listen now on the NPR Politics Podcast.

• 5:47Speaker 12

  American journalist Austin Tice vanished in Syria over a decade ago. For years, we've been searching for him, and now we finally have some answers.

• 5:58Speaker 13

  This is the person that Austin was...

• 6:00Speaker 14

  Oh my god. We found Austin's file.

• 6:03Speaker 12

  Listen to Where Is Austin Tice from NPR's Embedded and BBC Radio 4, on the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current, so you can win more deals. Learn more at hubspot.com.

• 6:31Speaker 15

  Part one, Rerum Novarum of Revolutionary Change.

• 6:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Every Sunday, Michael Harrington could be found at church. He was a pretty serious kid, good at school, and liked to eavesdrop on adult conversations about politics and faith, which there were a lot of in his devout Irish Catholic family.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  He was an only son, much beloved.

• 7:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Morris Isserman, author of The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  His mother hoped he would become a priest.

• 7:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  And the North Star for him and a lot of Catholics of this era was a doctrine from the 1890s put out by the Pope called Rerum Novarum. It called attention to the struggles of the working class and advocated for...

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Taking care of the poor, you know, class harmony, and we should really deal with the excesses of capitalism.

• 7:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Doug Green, author of A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism. Around the same time, a labor activist named Eugene Debs launched the Socialist Party of America and ran for president five times, pushing for things like an eight-hour workday, an end to child labor, and minimum wage laws. And although Debs never won, his ideas about labor permeated the American political system.

• 7:59Speaker 16

  The will of leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side.

• 8:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  Growing up, Michael didn't hear much about Debs or the socialists, but he did hear plenty about Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

• 8:12Speaker 16

  We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of national unity.

• 8:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  By the time Roosevelt took office in 1933, it was the height of the Great Depression. Michael was five years old, living comfortably in a segregated white neighborhood in St. Louis.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  He grows up in privilege. He's not super wealthy, but he's certainly not in the working class or very poor.

• 8:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Still, in Michael's home, Roosevelt was a hero.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  One of his relatives, I think it's an uncle, voted for Roosevelt four times and is on his deathbed in 1944, the last election that Roosevelt ran in, and insisted, "Take me to the ballot box, I need to vote for FDR."

• 8:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 9:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  I came across editorials he wrote denouncing birth control. This is in the late 1940s.

• 9:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  He was a believer.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  He was a true believer.

• 9:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  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...

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Was suddenly not surrendered by Catholics. He actually had a Protestant girlfriend from Wellesley, which he carefully didn't mention to his mother, and began to read much more widely.

• 10:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  He found himself gravitating towards books on philosophy, particularly those great French thinkers.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  And for a while, he wavered in his faith.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  It was torturous for him. And at one point, he basically makes the Pascalian wager: I'm going to believe because it's absurd.

• 10:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm going to believe because it's absurd.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:36Speaker 17

  Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you get all. If you lose, you lose nothing.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  And he takes the plunge.

• 10:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  He joins Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker Movement.

• 11:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  If they were hungry, feed them. If they were without clothes, find clothes for them. If they needed 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.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  She'd actually been around the Socialist and Communist Parties early in her life. Returns to church and basically, she works with the poor.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  By the 1950s, the population being served in the soup kitchens at the Catholic Worker tended to be a different kind of poor.

• 11:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  While some were living the white picket fence, middle-class dream, the Catholic Workers were spending every day with this different kind of poor.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Broken men, many with addictions, many alcoholics, whose poverty can't be explained in terms of individual failings.

• 12:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Living in the Catholic Worker House, along with the poor of the Lower East Side, working in their soup kitchen.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  He said it was the most left when you could be in the Catholic Church.

• 12:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  And the Catholic Worker, he was known as the guy with the typewriter.

• 12:40Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Had a circulation in the high 50,000s, you know, more than the Nation or the New Republic at the time.

• 12:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  He wrote about what he witnessed every day on the streets of New York City.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  He said, you know, there are a lot more poor people than most Americans think.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Since he's a very articulate and intelligent man, he speaks for the movement. He travels around.

• 13:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  And he started to meet different people across the political spectrum, including...

• 13:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:25Speaker 13

  Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

• 13:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  After a couple of years with the Catholic Workers, he just couldn't seem to shake those doubts he'd stuffed down.

• 13:44Speaker 02

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

• 13:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  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."

• 14:09Speaker 03

  He likes this idea of people living for something transcendent, something bigger than themselves.

• 14:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 14:30Speaker 16

  One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many.

• 14:35Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 14:41Speaker 02

  This is the height of McCarthyism.

• 14:44Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 14:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 Shakman, a leader in the socialism scene. Shakman was an immigrant from the Russian Empire, a one-time fan of Soviet communism who grew disillusioned because of the targeting of dissent.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Shakman is like, it's a new evil empire, and we can't support it.

• 15:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  Shakman realigned to a new worldview: democratic socialism, a political philosophy that had been around in some form since the 1800s. For Shakman, 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."

• 16:09Speaker 03

  They see themselves as aligned with the West.

• 16:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's like, it's a patriotic socialism.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  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."

• 16:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  What a line, right? "You can't be a socialist without loving America."

• 16:28Speaker 03

  Does that mean you're just going to whitewash the crimes of the American government and imperialism?

• 16:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  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...

• 17:00Speaker 02

  He became very much a believer in the positive role that the state, the government, could play.

• 17:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Michael Harrington tests the limits of what's possible.

• 17:14Speaker 18

  Hi, this is Regina from Washington, DC. You're listening to Throughline with NPR.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 17:26Speaker 19

  This week on Consider This, an investigation into widespread complaints about sales tactics at mall skincare kiosks led NPR to a company in California.

• 17:35Speaker 20

  Am I being recorded? Yeah. Okay, delete that, and we're not interviewing. If you need anything, you can contact our legal department.

• 17:41Speaker 19

  We investigate a group that supplies mall skincare stores that left customers with thousands of dollars in bills. And listen now on Consider This from NPR.

• 17:50Speaker 21

  Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current, so you can win more deals. Learn more at hubspot.com.

• 18:34Speaker 15

  Part Two: The Man Who Discovered Poverty.

• 18:39Speaker 22

  Let me say first that I accept the nomination of the Democratic Party.

• 18:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 18:56Speaker 22

  The obligation to devote every effort of my mind and spirit...

• 19:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 19:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  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."

• 19:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 20:02Speaker 23

  And we stand today on the edge of a new frontier.

• 20:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Standing in the crowd alongside him were heavy hitters of the movement: Roy Wilkins, Marion Barry, and of course, Martin Luther King Jr.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  He had met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1960 at the Democratic National Convention.

• 20:22Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 20:29Speaker 02

  He said he was very moved to realize that King was actually a year younger than he was.

• 20:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  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's 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 bestselling book he publishes in 1962.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  The Other America.

• 21:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Other America.

• 21:12Speaker 23

  Most Americans have just known a time of good food, presents, and family. And they probably think that's the way all Americans live, but it's not true. Tens of millions of Americans were poor, miserable, in body and in spirit.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  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 US census to make an argument that poverty was much more widespread than most people assumed.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  You'll see people saying, like, "The United States has overcome poverty."

• 22:01Speaker 02

  They tended to talk about it in terms that minimized its extent, pockets of poverty.

• 22:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Harrington found that the reality was twofold. Yes, government programs and unions had lifted millions out of poverty, but that progress...

• 22:18Speaker 02

  was distributed unequally, certainly racially unequally. The different groups that he looked at included African Americans...

• 22:26Speaker 23

  who work at 58% of the white wage.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Native Americans, it was unusual at that time to talk about Native American poverty. Hispanic Americans...

• 22:36Speaker 23

  There are farm workers, there are workers in the coalfields whose jobs have been destroyed by automation.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  The elderly...

• 22:43Speaker 23

  who are not only poor in income, but who are sick, who are living alone.

• 22:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  He believes that poverty constitutes a separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Somewhere between a quarter and a third, depending on how you counted, of the American population fell below the officially established poverty line.

• 23:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  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."

• 23:26Speaker 02

  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 expanding economy to create equality.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  And he had a particular reader in mind.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  You know, traditionally, Marxists, socialists, communists, 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. These benevolent rulers, enlightened liberals, they're the people who are essentially going to deliver things.

• 24:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  When The Other America was released, crickets.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  At first, this book could have just fallen through the cracks, no one would read it.

• 24:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 25:08Speaker 24

  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. It's just boring.

• 25:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  The review outlines in no uncertain terms just how bad the situation is.

• 25:28Speaker 24

  The worst part of being old and poor in this country is the loneliness.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  So this actually gets the book to sell well.

• 25:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Now, everyone was talking about it.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  He was suddenly being invited as a speaker around the country.

• 25:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  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, and...

• 25:55Speaker 02

  He was regarded as a close and welcome advisor. We didn't use jargon.

• 26:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  No mention of the proletariat or the masses.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  And pretty soon, people were calling him...

• 26:17Speaker 02

  "The man who discovered poverty."

• 26:22Speaker 16

  This is Situation Room, I read you, go ahead. Give me all available information of the President, over.

• 26:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  Meanwhile, the country was reeling from the assassination of President Kennedy.

• 26:32Speaker 25

  At 2:38 in the forward cabin of Air Force One, a necessary ceremony.

• 26:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  Which catapulted his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, into the presidency.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Johnson was an immensely complicated man, intensely ambitious.

• 26:48Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 27:01Speaker 02

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

• 27:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  One day, Harrington gets a call from a Johnson aide who says...

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Come down for consultation in Washington about this legislation that Lyndon Johnson is going to announce at the end of January in his State of the Union address.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  He's very excited, like, this is someone who, until The Other America, didn't really have steady unemployment.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  So Harrington goes down and then spends several weeks in these high-level consultations.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  He's kind of amazed when they're throwing around the numbers of what they can do on this program and that program.

• 27:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  This random Greenwich Village socialist is, you know, suddenly rubbing elbows with chief strategists within the new Johnson administration.

• 27:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  And he called himself a socialist, right? They knowingly invited a socialist in.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 28:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  And not long after these meetings, in January 1964, LBJ announced his war on poverty to the world.

• 28:21Speaker 23

  This administration, today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.

• 28:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  You know, 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.

• 29:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  He argued that the goal should be to realign the Democratic Party.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  That was the term used, realignment.

• 29:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Bring new voters, especially Black voters, into the party and push white Southern Democrats out of the party.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Who'd been blocking particularly civil rights legislation and lots of other progressive legislation for a generation.

• 29:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  Harrington sees the student movement, the civil rights movement, the workers movement...

• 29:28Speaker 03

  as having the potential for building a new leftist majority within the Democratic Party, which he definitely sees as a possibility by 1964, 1965.

• 29:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  It must have seemed to him like a tremendously hopeful moment that, you know, even a half-decade earlier would have been almost impossible to imagine.

• 30:05Speaker 16

  Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. Tonight, a war on poverty: Hope or hopeless?

• 30:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  Harrington was launched into the public eye, becoming an unofficial spokesperson for the White House.

• 30:22Speaker 03

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

• 30:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 30:56Speaker 26

  How do you define poverty for purposes of the poverty program?

• 31:02Speaker 27

  Well, it's not how I define it. It's how the government does.

• 31:05Speaker 26

  I'm more interested in your definition.

• 31:06Speaker 27

  OK, mine's the government's because it's become very precise.

• 31:09Speaker 26

  The government usually does what you tell it. It acts as...

• 31:11Speaker 27

  Oh, not at all.

• 31:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  This idea of the other America that Harrington had released into the world, it spread.

• 31:18Speaker 28

  The other America.

• 31:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  Even finding its way into the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.

• 31:24Speaker 28

  This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Martin Luther King used to joke with him, you know, like, we didn't know we were poor until we read your book.

• 31:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  After their first meeting on the eve of the DNC, Harrington had grown closer to King, becoming...

• 31:53Speaker 02

  A trusted advisor. He met with King at various places in the South.

• 31:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Do you think MLK would have called himself a democratic socialist?

• 32:03Speaker 02

  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 just, you know, this radical black agitator. He didn't need to be a radical black red agitator.

• 32:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  But by 1967, King's rhetoric was becoming more forceful, some might say more radical, on poverty.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Organizing a poor people's campaign.

• 32:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 32:40Speaker 28

  There comes a time when silence is betrayal.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  He's condemning the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  And he criticized himself. You know, 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.

• 33:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  He felt that if he spoke out too directly, too loudly, he would lose whatever influence he had. The Johnson administration...

• 33:31Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 33:51Speaker 29

  Hi, this is Melba in Springfield, Georgia, and you are listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 34:00Speaker 14

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 34:04Speaker 30

  This week on NPR's Newsmakers, Hassan Piker. He's a leading voice of what he calls the insurgent left, although he denies being a leader at all.

• 34:12Speaker 31

  I've never said I'm a kingmaker. The media keep saying this, but I don't think there can be a real kingmaker in socialist politics. This is mass politics.

• 34:21Speaker 30

  Hassan Piker talks with Leila Fadl this week on NPR's Newsmakers. You can watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if, instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current, so you can win more deals. Learn more at hubspot.com.

• 35:10Speaker 15

  Part Three: The Left Wing of the Possible.

• 35:15Speaker 16

  It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

• 35:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 35:53Speaker 07

  ...battled for possession of the BCS bunkers about possibly...

• 35:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Bloodied American soldiers, Vietnamese women and children, maimed, displaced, killed.

• 36:04Speaker 16

  Now they have nothing but one good meal a day.

• 36:11Speaker 28

  Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

• 36:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking out.

• 36:19Speaker 16

  If I'm gonna die, I'll die now, right here fighting you.

• 36:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Muhammad Ali was speaking out, casting the war as part of their same struggle.

• 36:26Speaker 16

  You my enemy. My enemy's a white people, not Viet Congs or Chinese or Japanese. You my opponent when I want freedom. You my opponent when I want justice.

• 36:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  Even Mick Jagger was singing about revolution.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  You see an explosion of the student movement, engaged in, like, street fighting, mass protest.

• 36:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  But one voice was noticeably absent: Michael Harrington. 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.

• 37:13Speaker 28

  I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

• 37:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was an election year. LBJ had already decided not to run for reelection, even before two assassinations rocked the country.

• 37:31Speaker 08

  The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis tonight. In the Ambassador Hotel last night, Senator Kennedy was shot.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  This upsets the political establishment in many respects, and opens up the Democratic Party to different candidates.

• 37:45Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 37:53Speaker 28

  How many men must die to justify some 23,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands?

• 38:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the end, Harrington chose to back LBJ's vice president, Hubert Humphrey.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Who is pro-war.

• 38:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 38:20Speaker 03

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

• 38:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  I was 17 in 1968, and I was outraged. I didn't see voting for someone like Hubert Humphrey as at all acceptable.

• 38:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  Morris Sizerman was then part of SDS, Students for Democratic Society, the main student activist group of the era.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  Ultimately, Hubert Humphrey doesn't win.

• 39:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  As for Harrington, a lot of the students brand him a sellout.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  SDS is gonna 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...

• 39:33Speaker 02

  I think he, you know, faced a genuine dilemma.

• 39:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  I watched the organization tear itself apart in a frenzy of sectarian conflict.

• 40:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  I agree, it's not a coincidence. And you also have a lot of people in the political establishment who are like, we gotta pull out.

• 40:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  But some in the Socialist Party pushed back, including Harrington's old mentor, Max Shakman. To them, defeating communism was the most important thing, even if it meant supporting Nixon. So they basically divorce. Each guy started his own new socialist group. Harrington called his the SOC.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.

• 41:02Speaker 07

  Let me begin with a crack by famous remark by Will Rogers. "I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat."

• 41:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 41:26Speaker 03

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

• 41:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  I had heard him speak on a number of occasions in the 1970s. And I was looking for reasons to disagree with him.

• 41:58Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 42:03Speaker 02

  He would always, at the start of a speech, say, "I have three points I want to make it." It was always three points. He always held his speeches down to about a half hour.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  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 great.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  And he would take questions.

• 42:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  One night, Morris decided to ask the question that had been bothering him since 1968.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  I asked in a hostile tone, "Should you have supported Hubert Humphrey?" And he said, "Yeah." And he explained why.

• 42:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  So that helped make me a Michael Harrington socialist.

• 42:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  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. The DSA brought together Harrington's D-SOC 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.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  It's unusual on the Left for mergers to take place.

• 43:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Before merging, they did have to resolve one big disagreement.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Some of them are a bit more pro-Palestinian than Harrington is. Harrington was a Zionist. Like, 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 Socialist International, he knew members of the Israeli Labor Party.

• 43:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  And the Palestinian question, how did he view that?

• 44:01Speaker 03

  I mean, he eventually came to more 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.

• 44:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  The more pro-Palestinian NAM members eventually moved past that, because...

• 44:19Speaker 03

  The key issue for them was getting rid of Reagan.

• 44:23Speaker 32

  Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

• 44:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Harrington was someone who could be invited to go speak before the National Convention of the United Auto Workers.

• 45:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  And he regularly appeared on NPR. Michael Harrington is best known for his book, The Other America, 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.

• 45:24Speaker 16

  First and perhaps foremost, to my mind, is the fact that America has the most heterogeneous working class in the world.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  So millions of people knew him.

• 45:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition.

• 46:01Speaker 33

  The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Harrington thought that Jesse Jackson was a little too militant, maybe a little too soft on communism at times.

• 46:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 46:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Harrington did end up backing Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential run.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  I think that Harrington's speaking had some of Jackson's campaign events by then.

• 46:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 47:24Speaker 32

  Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.

• 47:30Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it was untrue.

• 47:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  So poverty got a second chance, but it wasn't the fault of the War on Poverty.

• 48:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  Harrington's response?

• 48:28Speaker 02

  He would ask God why he mumbled. That is why he didn't get his message across more clearly.

• 48:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  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...

• 49:06Speaker 34

  Democratic socialism.

• 49:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Morris Sisserman says while Sanders deserves credit for reviving interests in Harrington's DSA, the seeds had been planted earlier.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  I think a new openness to questioning capitalism begins with the economic crisis of 2008, which sees 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.

• 49:45Speaker 05

  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."

• 50:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 US complicity in Israel's genocide and apartheid at every level."

• 50:41Speaker 02

  I mean, 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'd stayed with us for another four decades, he would have continued to change.

• 51:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Harrington held on to the belief that, in the long run, the Democratic Party could change too.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  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, et cetera. When that's not the case. The Democrats are actually a party of Wall Street, a 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 it very much.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  I mean, if there is a heaven, you know, I can see him up there on the left coast of heaven, you know, kind of smiling down on Zoron and on the New York City chapter of TSA and on AOC, because they really represent his vision of a left wing of the possible.

• 52:32Speaker 35

  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?

• 52:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  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. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and Julia Redpath.

• 53:17Speaker 15

  Molly Marcello. Sarah Wyman. Amy Padula. Leanna Simstrom.

• 53:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Irene Noguchi. This episode was fact checked by Kevin Vogel. It was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music by Ramtin Arablouei and his band, Drop Electric. Thanks also to Tom Pyle, Florian Hertel, Spencer Wetzel, Yulise Gosey, Antoine Jorlaire, Johannes Dergi, and Josie Ghetto. And finally, if you have an idea or liked 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 Throughline from NPR. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Thanks for listening.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 54:06Speaker 36

  This week on Sources and Methods, President Trump's diesel deal with Russia. Would it help with shipping costs? And would it even be legal? The United States produces more diesel than it consumes. There's no real need to bring more diesel into this country. Plus, we dig into claims from Ukraine that the US cut access to crucial military satellites. Listen now to Sources and Methods from NPR.

• 54:30Speaker 37

  Hey, how are you feeling right now? Exhausted from the summer? Overwhelmed with the new school year? Restless? Anxious? Life Kit is here to help. Consider us your mental health accountability buddy, with episodes on everything from navigating social anxiety to unlearning perfectionism. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.