Breaking History - Beautiful Losers: Mamdani & The End of Socialism’s Losing Streak

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

For 124 years, the American socialist movement has been defined by defeat. From Eugene Debs’ doomed presidential runs to Michael Harrington’s quiet organizing, it’s been a story of almosts: almost mainstream, almost powerful, almost relevant. Until now. In this episode, we look at how Zohran Mamdani’s likely mayoral victory marks the first real crack in America’s century-long resistance to socialism—and why its impact will reach far beyond New York City. CREDITS Executive Producer: Poppy Damon Associate Producer: Adam Feldman Sound Designer and Composer: Tony Peer Original theme songs by Eli Lake Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, listeners. It's me. It's Eli. I am asking you at the top of the show to please rate us well on Spotify and Apple and YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. Tell your friends, write a nice review. We really want to get the word out on breaking history because we hear at the free press, myself, Poppy Damon, my senior producer, Adam Feldman, Jonathan Rosen. We work very hard on putting these little documentaries together. And we just think that more people would like to know about it. And the more people that listen, the more resources we will have to continue to make great podcasts. Now, coming up next, we dive into the likely next mayor of New York City, Zohanam Dhani, and we look at the man who founded his party, the Democratic Socialists of America. It is a gripping tale. And in some ways a warning about what happens when you try to open. your big tent to radicals and illiberal revolutionaries.

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So it looks like the next mayor of the greatest city in the world is going to be this guy. The corporate greed that we're seeing in this country, it cannot be separated from the level of inequality that people are living through. A Zoran Mondani victory

will mean many things if he pulls it off, a clear signal that the New York and possibly National Democratic Party has lurched further to the left than it ever has before. A potential for an even more intrusive welfare state for our country's largest city.

But first and foremost, Mayor Zoran Mamdani would be a triumph for American socialism. He's attacking you as a communist. Are you? No, I'm a democratic socialist. That means I believe in dignity for all people. This represents the peak for a movement that began when Eugene V. Debs, a former railroad union organizer, formed the first American socialist party in 1901. For 124 years, no socialist has come close to the kind of power that Zonan Mandani is about to seize if he wins the election next week. Yes, it's true.

David Dinkins was technically a member of DSA's predecessor organization and nominally the DSA itself, but he was also a lifelong member of the Democratic Party. The DSA endorsed him in 1989 when he defeated the incumbent mayor of New York, Ed Koch, in the Democratic primary, but unlike Mamdani, David Dinkins didn't run his campaign as a socialist. He was a member of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders did come close in 2016 to winning the Democratic Party's nomination to be president. AOC and Rashida Talib are, of course, national political stars, but they are members of the House of Representatives.

They are not anything close to the mayor of New York. None of them have the clout and power of a man who is all but certain to be occupying Gracie Mansion for the next four years. And he's only 34 years old. He's nearly half a century younger than Bernie Sanders, a socialist representing Astoria in the New York State Assembly in Albany.

beat out the Speaker of New York City Council, Adrian Adams, the city comptroller, Brad Lander, and Sion of New York royalty, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, last June in the Democratic primary. Today, eight months after launching this campaign, with the vision of a city that every New Yorker could afford, we have won.

When you, enter a Zoron rally or event, there is this overwhelming feel of optimism. This is my free press colleague, Olivia Rheingold, who has been on the Mamdani beat for a year since his humble beginning, polling at 1%. If you look closely or you listen hard enough, you know, some cracks start to form, and perhaps the message is not as progressive as it seems. But on face value, a lot of people I speak with make the comparison to Obama. They say that the overwhelming feeling is hope, and they believe that his message is one of positivity.

You can see it. Zoran has a million-dollar smile. Celebrities love him. He has tapped our national zeitgeist. Momdani is cool. Check out his viral YouTube video in July. brother zoron what's going on man this is jubal bowman tonight i have an extra ticket to the wu tank playing concert in madison square garden come through that voice you hear is former congressman jemal bowman a fellow socialist and over the course of two and a half minutes

the young zoron is filmed as he is dapped up by new yorkers on his way to the backstage of madison square garden where he talks recent New York political history with Wu-Tang Clan lyricist Rizza. Could you imagine Andrew Cuomo, who is now running as an independent in the general election, doing that? I mean, maybe if it was Billy Joel at the Garden, but Wu-Tang?

You are part of that continuum, too, my brother, as you're bringing new energy and ideas and authenticity and humanity. And Mamdani is promising what, on the surface, our popular reform. He wants to make the buses free. I'll make buses fast and free. So I can just get where I'm going.

He wants to stop landlord from raising the rent. Leaks, rats, a literal beehive in the wall. Housing isn't just more expensive than ever. It's falling apart. And he also wants to globalize the intifada? Do you condemn that phase, globalize the intifada, which a lot of people hear is a call to violence against you?

My concern is to start to start. to walk down the line of language and making clear what language, I believe, is permissible or impermissible, takes me into a place similar to that of the president who is looking to do those very kinds of things, putting people in jail for writing an op-ed, putting them in jail for protesting. Ultimately, it's not language that I use. It's language I understand there are concerns about. And what I will do is showcase my vision for the city through my words in my own. Huh? That's weird. He doesn't use that language, but he won't condemn the phrase? Why not? The second Intifada was a five-year campaign of suicide bombings at bus stops,

markets, and synagogues. A globalized intifada would unleash terror against Jews all over the world. So why not just give a straight answer instead of dissembling on increasing hate crime prevention funding and voicing opposition to Donald Trump's crackdown on pro-Hamas green card holders? I mean, one can oppose the ice raids and deportations and still make it clear that the slogans of jihadists are wrong. And this has been a pattern. You won't say that Hamas should lay down their arms and give up leadership in Gaza.

I don't really have opinions about the future of Hamas and Israel beyond the question of justice and safety and the fact that anything has to abide by international law. You don't have an opinion on whether the terrorists who started the Gaza war with a murder, rape, and kidnapping spree two years ago should lay down their weapons? What? Well, Mamdani went into clean-up mode. Sort of. Here he is at the first mayoral debate earlier this month. Of course, I believe that they should lay down their arms. I'm proud to be one of the first

elected officials in the state who called for a ceasefire. And calling for a ceasefire means seizing fire. That means all parties have to cease fire and put down their weapons. Again, with the both sides? the 20-point Trump peace plan doesn't call on the state of Israel to disarm but Mamdani can't quite say Hamas should unless the Jewish state does as well and then there was this

Democratic candidate for New York City mayor Zoran Mamdani is facing backlash after posting a photo with a Brooklyn Imam linked to the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 2017, when Zoran was briefly a SoundCloud rapper which might be disqualifying in and of itself for some, he released a song where he praises the Holy Land Five, the terrorism financiers who funneled some $12 million to Hamas.

If you want to understand why Zoran Mamdani seems so reasonable on so many things, except for the existence of the world's only Jewish state, well, it helps to look at his political party, because the next mayor of New York is not a Democrat. Hello, DSA members! Zoran Mamdani is a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. Now, Mamdani does not hide this. He emphasizes that he is a democratic socialist, a distinction that once may have meant something.

Unlike, say, the old American Communist Party or the Weather Underground, Democratic socialists are supposed to believe in redistributing wealth through persuasion, elections, and organizing, not violent revolution. And the crazy thing is, is that the socialists. are about to win a really important election, the most important in their entire history, at the very moment that the party has been taken over by illiberal revolutionaries who display hammers and sickles in their social media profiles the way white nationalists bear swastikas. Today, the DSA is run by activists enamored with the authoritarian left.

Last year, the New York chapter gave a rapturous standing ovation for a speech by Cuba's deputy foreign minister. Its national program calls for a new constitution that replaces the House and Senate with a single federal legislature and places, quote, workers in charge of the federal government, end quote. The DSA supports the abolition of prisons and the defunding of the police. DSA's international committee has taken a neutral stance on Russian. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, calling on Russian troops to leave while opposing any U.S. or NATO aid to Ukraine. Last year, the DSA signed on to an open letter, respecting the rigged election in Venezuela, even after several independent observers and Latin American governments themselves

said that the dictator Nicolas Maduro had stolen it. But the biggest and most pressing and defining issue for the DSA in recent years, has been Israel. The party now resembles the Alaksa Martyrs Brigade when it comes to that state. Here is the scene at the 2017 DSA Convention when the party officially endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanction of Israel.

All of those in favor of the resolution raise your voting cards. Thank you, all of those opposed. Emotion carries. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free From the river to the sea Palestine will be free From the river to the sea

Palestine will be free From the river to the sea Palestine will free Which has become so ubiquitous on campus In the last two years Comes right out of Hamas Except their version of it in Arabic Says Palestine will be Arab

It's a direct call for the elimination of Israel. Here is Mamdani himself on August 4, 23, two months before Hamas started the Gaza war with the October 7 massacre, explaining why he is a member of DSA. I was somebody who began my journey in organizing and in politics by co-founding my school's first students for justice in Palestine. The struggle for Palestinian liberation was at the core of my politics and continues to be. And so I struggled to find a home in New York City that could bring that politics in a sense of coherence with the politics I felt around the future of New York City. And here was this organization that endorsed BDS, something which so many organizations that were composed of Muslims were struggling to do at the time.

And so I found this organization what won me over was the sincerity of it. It was that sincerity that we mean what we say. When we say we have a socialist politic, it is consistent, it is universal, and it stands for justice in every place with no exception. Now you may be thinking, what does the existence of Israel have to do with free healthcare and workers' rights? It wasn't that long ago. Wasn't that long ago that American Socialists professed solidarity with this country, that was

ruled by a Socialist Party for the first 30 years of its existence, but even if Israel was governed by Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek. It's bizarre that the cause of destroying this tiny nation state has come to define our own country's largest socialist party. In this respect, one could say that the DSA is Palestine first. We are listening to a DSA-led March only 13 days after October 7th, 2023. The party refused to condemn the perpetrators of the heart. Some chapters even celebrated this act of glorious resistance. An official DSA messaging kit after the pogrom included these talking points.

Resistance comes in all forms. Arms struggle, general strike and popular demonstrations. All of it is. legitimate and all of it is necessary. All of this was too much for a handful of some of the DSA OGs. One open resignation letter from two dozen X members printed in the New Republic was withering. In its inability to distinguish between acts of resistance to unjust an oppressive rule and acts of terror against civilians and in its confusion of authentic striving for national liberation with theocratic, fascistic crimes.

DSA has shown that has become completely unmoored from the moral and political foundations of democratic socialism. So what happened? The DSA, which began in 1982, was originally meant to represent the left of the possible. To borrow the phrase of its founder, Michael Harrington, its strategy was to drag the Democratic Party to the left. But in recent years,

and opened its door to revolutionaries. It's very clear that these Trotskyist groups, these Marxist-Leninist groups, these Maoist groups, they're a voting bloc in the national organization. This is historian and former DSA member, Jake Altman. They control a majority of the votes. And so there's this real tension between the, you know,

the people who have more pragmatic means and then the people who are these purists who believe that they're going to start a vanguard party and have a revolution. This counts as an extraordinary irony, because the Molotov throwers are about to have a comrade in City Hall. H. L. Mencken once warned that democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. Five burrows are about to find out why. I'm Eli Lake and you're listening to Breaking His In this episode, we tell New Yorkers what to know about their new ruling party, the history

of Mayor Mamdani's DSA, and the tragic arc of the man who founded that party. Michael Harrington. Keep it locked. The baggage spreader, you look apart, you laugh the cheddar, both thumboree, and jeeper sandals, go hacky-sacked, it's hard to handle. The FBS, a little weather. a mess but now it's better for 30 years nobody noticed now we're here and we are focused yes we want to thank the idea and all the bible wants c3s now we teach your PhDs

and we want the NYC we want to thank the news and all the times they're too far side I promise to reside among their rights and fight. Before we get into life of Michael Harrington, let's take a few minutes to talk about socialism in America. As most of you probably know, socialism is the ideology that stemmed from the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and others. We could do several hours on this, but the bottom line is that socialism is the greed that workers should own the means of production, that industry itself is a public good and should be controlled by the people. While all the other advanced industrialized democracies have major socialist parties that

really compete for power, think of the UK Labor Party, here in the USA, socialism has been about as popular as the metric system. The Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901 by Eugene V. DeN. for example, won 6% of the popular vote in the 1912 presidential election. That was as well as it ever did. After he died in 1926, Norman Thomas, grandfather of longtime Newsweek editor and popular historian Evan Thomas, took over. Between 1928 and 1948,

Norman Thomas ran for president six times and each time barely made a dent. His high watermark was 1932 when, he received a little more than 2% of the vote, and frankly, one can see why Norman Thomas wasn't very popular. We are socialist because we believe that this income which we all cooperate in making isn't divided as it ought to be. There were, of course, small victories here and there. Milwaukee elected a few socialist mayors in the 20th century.

So do the thriving metropolis of Schenectady, New York. And, of course, who could forget Reading, Pennsylvania? But let's be real, as a political force in American life. The socialist parties were a joke, the stereotype of the 20th century American socialist, an aging New Yorker with food stains on his sweater, lecturing an audience of seven people at a public library in Brooklyn about Reaganomics. Woody Allen, I think, captured this best in the opening of Annie Hall. I think I'm going to get better as I get older.

I think I'm going to be the balding virile type, you know, as opposed to say the distinguished gray, for instance, you know, unless I'm neither of those two, unless I'm one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism. Now, all of that said, the intellectual influence of socialism, as opposed to the political power of socialist parties was real. Many of the ideas in FDR's New Deal were borrowed from Norman Thomas and other socialists. Things like Social Security, public housing, and a social safety net were first advocated by the socialists. And that's the context for understanding Michael Harrington. He would go on to found the Democratic

Socialist of America, Mamdani's Party. But before he did, he was an intellectual reformer who did his best to make the Democratic Party led by Adley Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Baines Johnson adopt the socialism of Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs. Harrington is largely forgotten today, but in the 1960s, in 1970s, and even the 1980s, he was a standard bearer for the American left. He coined the term neo-conservative in a 1973 essay for dissent magazine, where he attacked the first generation of ex-leftists who were now leveling deep critiques of the welfare state that Harrington helped inspire.

born in 1928 to a middle-class family in St. Louis, Harrington began his public career in the Bowery of New York City as a disciple of the Catholic Workers Movement, led by Dorothy Day. He took a vow of poverty and rose quickly to become the editor of the movement's newspaper, The Catholic Worker. But he was also a bit of a skirt chaser. He was also a ladies' man. He had tons of girlfriends.

He was famous for that from going to one. to the other. And Dorothy Day, and he also smoked marijuana at the time briefly. This is historian and former DSA member Ron Radash. Maybe he did smoke pot later, but then he would advise all the people he was associated with not to do it, he said. We'd say, we've got to be serious and build a movement. And if you're going to do that, you have to get off drugs. But he, Dorothy Day said to him, look, Mike, you like women too much. You can't join our movement, take the vow of poverty and live here at the Catholic Worker House, which is what other people did.

They lived there sustaining themselves only in contributions for food, and they had rooms for the activists who ran the newspaper free, or, of course, a penny, a Catholic worker. And she said, think carefully because I don't think you're made for this movement. So he wisely decided she's right, and he did not join the Catholic Worker Movement full time. Harrington may have left the Catholic Workers' movement, but he still cared a great deal about the workers themselves. And in the late 1950s, he joined the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas, which at that point counted only a few thousand deuce-meying members. Still in his 20s, Harrington was blossoming into a public intellectual.

His big break came in 1962, when he penned his most enduring work, the other America, an expanded version of an essay he first wrote in 1958 for Commentary Magazine. The book was a searing indictment of an America that didn't choose to see the poverty of millions of its neighbors. At precisely that moment in history, where for the first time, a people have the material ability to end a poverty, they lack the will to do so. They cannot see. They cannot act. The consciences of the well-off are the victims of affluence. The lives of the poor are the victims of a physical and spiritual misery. The influence of the other America remains with us today. Harrington popularized the concept of the culture of poverty, how being poor should not just be measured as a lack of money, but as the expectations for life passed down through generations. The influence was also felt in terms of major government programs.

I will let William F. Buckley take it from here. From whom you're about to hear, and by whom I am about to be whiplashed, is commonly acknowledged as the man who first declared the war on poverty. The only war he has ever declared, I hasten to add, since as regards orthodox wars, he is a conscientious abjector. His most famous book called The Other America, a portion of the American population beset by tormenting poverty. That book caught the attention of Professor Walter Heller,

who brought it to the attention of President Kennedy on the 19th of November, 1963. That book was a toxin call for massive federal action to a brute American poverty. And President Kennedy tended his approval for such a program and three days later died. But when Dr. Heller took the subject up with Mr. Kennedy's successor, Mr. Johnson, reacted with enthusiasm, and so the war was born towards the prosecution of which we were spending about $2 billion a year.

This was on April 4, 1966, the debut episode of Buckley's Firing Line. For more on Buckley, I recommend our episode from a few back. We can really see here how Harrington gets to this idea of the left of the possible. He writes a book calling attention to the culture of poverty and the president of the United States commits billions of dollars to a new war on poverty. Why should a socialist party compete with Democrats when a Democratic president like Lyndon Johnson

wants to implement socialist ideas? And at the same time, Harrington also understood that Johnson was not a socialist. He was a liberal reformer, and as such, Harrington saw his job was to keep pushing the Democrats from the outside. side. Here he is on that firing line again with Buckley. First of all, I'm not a leader of the federal government's poverty program. I specifically,

I was not offered a job, but I specifically did not take a job because although I appreciate the beginning effort and I'm for it, I want to be out calling for more and not saying that what we've done is enough. I don't believe it is. So I'm not a leader. Secondly, let me say unambiguously that there is nothing socialist or revolutionary about the present poverty program. All of this is particularly important to understanding Harrington's politics. On the one hand, he's willing to work within the system and credit reformers when they reform. But he still has his eyes on the big rise of social democracy. After the break, Harrington meets the new lap and never quite recovers.

Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. expertly cleaned and folded, so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you, or this tea time you, or even this tea time you. Said you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rince, it's time to be great. I was one of the authors of the Port Huron statement, the original Port Huron statement. Uh-huh. Not the compromise second draft.

We just heard from the dude, the protagonist of the Big Lebowski, one of my favorite movies. I play that clip because it's a reference to the 1962 Port Huron statement. There really were two drafts, and the second one really did try to water down the first one at the behest of more moderate socialists in the League of Industrial Democracy. The Port Huron's statement was the founding charter of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. That's the main group that a few years later

would turn college campuses into pitch battlefields over the Vietnam War. These were the activists that took over the campus buildings in Colombia in 1968 and helped organize the marches and riots in Chicago that year during the Democratic Convention. Now, this is a deal. general audience podcast, so I will not be going into great detail on the doctrinal differences

between the various factions and sub-factions of American socialism. But if you want to get a picture of this kind of thing, I really recommend Monty Python's Life of Brian. Listen, if you wanted to join a PFJ, you'd have to really hate the roads. I do. Oh, yeah, how much? A lot. right herein listen the only people we ate more than the romans are the judean people's front and the judean popular people's front of judeas and the people's front of judea spliters the people's front of judea splitters we're the people's front of judea so we would come to know groups like sDS as the new left They were not like the socialists of the early and middle 20th century, like Norman Thomas,

or Eugene Debs, or for that matter, Michael Harrington. They were influenced by a new anti-colonialism, thinkers like Franz Fanon, and third-world radicals like Che Guevara. Waiting for some party boss in the White House to read your book on poverty was too slow. The revolution was now. Now, a little background is very important. this moment, the major American socialist up to this point, including, of course, Michael Harrington, still pined for the end of concentrated capital. They thought that a powerful ruling class

that controlled industry undermined our democracy. And at the same time, they were explicitly not revolutionary. The means mattered. Socialism in America should be achieved through persuasion and elections. Harrington and his acolytes opposed the Soviet Union. They wanted to make America more equitable, but they also did not want Moscow to win the Cold War. It could not be said for other factions of the American left, like the American Communist Party, basically parroted whatever line they were getting from the Kremlin. So someone like Harrington could be a blistering critic of the U.S. government when it came to civil rights or the lack of an adequate welfare state.

But at the same time, denounced the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. or its treatment of political prisoners. These were not contradictions for social Democrats like Harrington. They represented a fidelity to socialist ideals. The burgeoning new left, however, saw things differently. One of its leaders, a charismatic Californian named Tom Hayden, believed the old socialist anti-communism was making the case indirectly for American Empire. For Hayden, anti-communism was the marvellous.

of a controlled opposition, incapable of really wanting to stop the Vietnam War. These two visions clash in the summer of 1962 at a retreat owned by the United Auto Workers. Looking back on the Port Huron statement today, it seems pretty tame compared to what would be coming in the 1960s, but at the time, it was considered a radical break with the Socialist Party. It was the statement section on international communism that caused, all the trouble. But present trends in American anti-communism are not sufficient for the creation of appropriate policies with which to relate and to counter communist movements in the world. In no instance is this better illustrated than our basic national policy-making

assumption that the Soviet Union is inherently expansionist and aggressive, prepared to dominate the rest of the world by military means. On this assumption rests the monstrous American structure of military preparedness. Because of it, we sacrifice values and social programs to the alleged needs of military power. Now, I should say that the preceding paragraph of the Port Huron statement acknowledges all the evils of the Soviet system. But this wiggle room that we just heard, this neutralism, if you will, really bothered Harrington and the League of Industrial Democracy, which had initially sponsored Hayden's SDS to be its new, youth wing. This was what the party called United Frontism. They did not want any communist loyal to

Moscow inside their socialist big tent. In the spring leading up to the Port Huron Convention, Harrington and Hayden went back and forth over the language, and while Harrington won a battle of sorts when the first draft was revised to include stronger language condemning the Soviets. Harrington also sensed he lost the war for the future of American Socialism. He lost the war for the youth. On July 6th, Harrington called Hayden and his comrade Robert Allen Haber for the League of Industrial Democracy.

He intended to purge these disobedient whippersnappers from the party. Here is an account from Maurice Iserman's biography of Harrington, The Other American. You knew this would send lid through the roof, Michael thundered at Hayden and Haber. This issue was settled on the left 10 or 20 years ago, and that you could countenance any united frontism now is inconceivable. When Hayden protested that if Michael would take the time to read the Port Huron's statement, he would see that it clearly condemned communism, Michael was unbending.

Documents schmockuments. Sleiman and I said that this was antithetical to the lid and everything it stood for. The SDS was out. From the perspective of many old school socialists, this was the right thing to do. A few years later on college campuses, the SDS would wave the flag. of third world revolutionaries enchant their admiration for O.G. Min, the leader of communist North Vietnam. So Harrington and I were really kind of in tandem, although a generation apart,

and I very much looked up to him as a leader and a teacher and so on. This is Joshua Morafchik, a former national chairman of the youth wing of the Socialist Party, who himself would migrate closer to the right over time. We were not in sync with the new left of that moment. And because the new left, because we were very clear anti-communists, and that we would apply, I mean, I've remained one forever, but, but Harrington was too, and it bothered him that we were out of sync with the new left. There were all these thousands of activists on the college campuses. They were they may have started out being anti-Vietnam war, but they, again, that movement moved steadily leftward until it became not merely anti-Vietnam war. It wasn't anti-Vietnam war, it's only anti-America side in that war. But they would chant, ho, ho-she-men, the Viet Cong is going

to win. So they made a leap to embrace the other side. purged Hayden and Haber. But he always felt queasy about the whole thing. He was only 33 years old at the time, the same age as Zoran Mamdani, I might add, when he began his campaign. And for the first time in his life, Michael Harrington felt middle age. He was no longer part of the youth movement. This is Carl Gershman, a former 60s socialist who would go on to create the National Endowment for Democracy. When they adopted the Port Huron statement, which was the key statement to the founding of the new left. And they basically rejected anti-communism.

It led to a very sharp split between Harrington, on the one hand, and the League for Industrial Democracy and Irving Howe and all those people, a very sharp split between them and Tom Hayden and the new leftists. Harrington regretted that for the rest of his life. He was never going to allow anything like that to happen again. This is important. Gershman and Merovich in the 1960s would have

eventually become the neo-conservatives that Harrington would end up deriding in dissent magazine. The reason was because they saw the new left in the 1960s, initially led by Tom Hayden and the SDS, as appeasers of evil. This wasn't because the old socialist believed in American imperialism, it was because they understood the dangers of left-wing authoritarianism and totalitarianism. While SDS and the new left gained momentum in the 1960s, Harrington gained, gain control of the dwindling American Socialist Party. In 1968, Harrington would become its chairman. He would preside over its demise.

In 1972, the party dissolved. To get a sense of where American socialism was heading in 1972, consider the June 1969 SDS Convention in Chicago. This is the year of the Great Break. A group of radicals conducted a push, pushing out the mainstream leadership, who were fine with riots and building takeovers on campus, but had nonetheless failed a revolutionary purity test. Within a few months, the organization would fall apart, and the new leaders would now call themselves the weather underground. Here is some footage from that

convention. I'm Mike Klonti, national secretary of SDS, and this is Bernstein going inter-organizational secretary. There are a timing inspection making a big power play for SDS. Is there a I guess there is. Remarkable. It was only seven years earlier that the Port Huron statement with its mild critique of anti-communism was enough for Michael Harrington to purge Tom Hayden and Robert Alan Haber from the League of Industrial Democracy. Now, the SDS was run by activists who proudly identified with international communism. One might think a man like Harrington, now in his early 40s, would take a lesson from all of this, the same

lesson of the past socialist leaders, perhaps. No collaboration with radicals. But this is not the lesson that Harrington learned. He got soft. I don't think he ever changed away from his anti-communism, which is why a lot of the people who have taken over at DSA hate him because he never gave that up. But he thought that by embracing them, he could win them to his view. This is Joshua Moravchik again. And his view also became mercury

when it got to third world revolutionaries who were not official communists, but who were certainly not Democrats. So he later, His most famous book was called The Other America about poverty in America. Some dozen years later, 15 years later, he published a book about the third world and was called The Other World. And in the front of the book, the book is dedicated to Julius Nyereri, who was the dictator of Tanzania. and there was not a shred of democracy in Tanzania, under Niroiri.

So to back up, after the Socialist Party of America dissolves in 1972, Harrington formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee a year later. The new party was still trying to be Democratic Socialists. Harrington never gave up on influencing the Democratic Party. He never gave up on persuasion and elections. but at the same time he had dropped his opposition to a united front. Eventually, in 1982, the D-Soc, as it was known, merged with the New American Movement, which itself was a loose political organization for former communists and new left activists

who were not willing to become domestic terrorists like the Weather Underground, but still really liked the ideology. The New American Movement came out of those marches as Leninists largely. who left the Communist Party out of embarrassment that they had been supporting Stalin and Stalinism for so long. But they didn't change their ideology. This is Ron Radosh again. They still believed in revolutionary communism.

They came in to DSA, and these ex-communists, like the famous Communist Party chairwoman in California, who built up one of the most vital Communist Party groups in the West Coast, the Communist Party USA under the leadership of Dorothy Healey. Dorothy Healy

quit the Communist Party by that time and she went with the new American movement people into this new organization, Democratic Socialists of America. And at first she was very wary. She said, I can't be in an organization that Irving Howe was in. Because Irving Howe was against

the stance taken by at the Port Huron movements when they agreed to let communists into the youth organization. How Alan Harrington pulled out and would have nothing to do with it. And it was under Howe's leadership and emphasis in particular

how it was aghast and having the communists come into a democratic youth movement he was trying to build. So these former communists, including the former chairman of the Commons Party USA in California, joined DSA, and a lot of people follow her. Radash knows of what he speaks.

In 1982, he was a member of the New American Movement, and he was personally recruited to the new DSA by Michael Harrington himself. In fact, when I came into DSA, I had met with Harrington, very friendly, Harrington essentially recruited me. He said, you can have any position. want, but there are two things you have to accept. We consider the Soviet Union a totalitarian country that we oppose when we oppose American capitalism. He said, I'm a student of Max Schachman who developed this idea that the Soviet Union is not a failed socialist society

like Trotsky believed, but are still socialist. It just had to be reformed. They believed socialism was developed in Russia, it had to be a revolution to destroy the whole system there. Harrington said you have to accept Shackman's view of the Soviet Union, and you have to accept that we're pro-Israel 100%, and we align ourselves with the Israeli government. Well, that's interesting, especially given the DSA's solidarity today with the Islamo-Fascist organizations that seek to destroy Israel. But I don't credit Harrington too much. He enabled the evolution by inviting the illiberal Marxist into his big tent in the first place.

For the final years of Harrington's life, he toiled in relative obscurity. His DSA never gained any traction during the Reagan Revolution. In 1991, the DSA had 10,000 members. By way of contrast, it has more than 80,000 today. The world had moved on. Harrington died of esophical camps. her on July 31st, 1989, just three months before the Berlin Wall came down. I don't doubt that he would have celebrated the end of the East German prison state.

He would have also celebrated the end of the Soviet Union. But the rest of his organization at this point was ambivalent. The January, February, 1992 issue of the Democratic Left, which is the DSA's official party organ, for example, made barely a mention of the collapse of the Soviet Union in its issue that year. Instead, it focused on policies to recover from the Republican recession, as they called it, and looking at the Swedish economic model. The DSA would remain in obscurity for the 1990s and the 2000s. One bright spot was a socialist mayor in Burlington, Vermont,

a former honorary chairman of the DSA, who in later years would allow his membership, to lapse. You may have heard of him. His name was Bernie Sanders. Here he is in 1985, praising the illiberal Sandinistas who had taken over Nicaragua. Sandinista government, in my view, has more support among the Nicaraguan people, substantially more support than Ronald Reagan has. Leaving aside the fact that Reagan won 49 states in the 1984 election, five years after Bernie predicted more Nicaraguan supported the Sandinistas than Americans supported Ronald Reagan, the radical socialist were voted out of power in the first free election since the revolution in 1979. Well, Bernie would go on to energize American socialism

in a way that seemed impossible at the end of Harrington's life. My view of democratic socialism builds on the success of many other countries around the world, who have done a far better job than we have in protecting the needs of their working families, their elderly citizens, their children, they're sick, and they're poor. Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system which is corrupt, that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy. That was the beginning of Bernie's campaign in 2015 for the Democratic Party's nomination, and he nearly won, winning 46% of the pledged delegates that year,

putting a major scare into Hillary Clinton. That spark of momentum led to a new generation of DSA leaders. As my sister, Ianna Presley likes to say, the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power. Every genocide enabler, look at this room's, motherfuckers. We ain't going anywhere. The only answer to growing autocracy is firing up the engines of our grassroots democracy.

And now Zoran Mamdani is expected to become the next mayor of New York City. He has tried his best to moderate some of his positions. For example, he recently said he would, not have a Zionism litmus test for his administration. Bravo. Olivia Rheingold went on the DSA message boards, which is available only to dues paying members, to see the reaction.

This one user, he wrote, I want Zoran to publicly apologize to the Palestinian community regarding his recent statements and put a policy in place to check that no one on his staff holds positive views of Zionism. If not, I will write a proposal to my chapter to censure him, and I hope other chapters follow suit. Someone commented on that, and they said, please do this. Then there was infighting of, you know, the fact that Zonan has said that there could be Zionists in his administration. Can we live with this?

Do we need to censure him? And to me, this is a strong sign of buckle up. Like the DSA, yes, historically, they have been his greatest supporter. but they are going to scrutinize everything he's doing. And maybe he doesn't want to have a litmus test of his staff members' positions on Israel, but the DSA is going to have litmus tests of their own. And they're going to watch what he does very closely.

This wouldn't be the first time the DSA turned on one of its stars. This year, the party came very close to purging AOC herself after she voted for U.S. funding. for a missile defense system for Israel known as Iron Dome. In some ways, this is to be expected. It's true that there is a variety of opinion within DSA. This is Joshua Mirovchik again. There's left and further left and still further left.

But what happened now is that the group that has taken over the executive bodies elected at this recent convention, is now the far left, which really has no even a residual connection to democracy. The people it admires in the world are communists and other totalitarian or authoritarian socialist revolutionaries, what have you. We did some of our own on-the-ground reporting. We sent our producer Adam Feldman out to a party meeting, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to get the mood after Mamdani pledged to retain the current police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, if he is to win the mayoral election next week. Here's what he had to say. I went to a kind of run-down back porch of a bar in Bushwick, Brooklyn. There was the main bar area

that was open to anybody else. And then in this back porch area, it was a meeting of Reform and Revolution, a caucus of the DSA. And it was a meeting of about 40 people in a kind of marijuana-filled back porch room, a lot of beer, kind of chatting away. It was an informal meeting of sorts in which a few leaders of Reform and Revolution Caucus got up to speak, and then it was open to the broader attendees to ask questions, give comments all related to how should Zoran govern. There was a consistent level of disappointment of Zoran's more recent statements of him moderating, trying to appeal to more people in the center to prove that he's not this big, scary guy, what all the headlines say about him. So that's including saying that he would have Zionists in his

administration, not being a litmus test, the reported rumors that he'd keep Commissioner Tish on, apologizing about calling the police racist and calling to defund them, there absolutely was resistance to that, and they were upset about it. But also, they weren't surprised. There seemed to be a consensus that they all knew, that they're all quite cynical about how electoral politics work, and that they knew that Zoran would be doing these kinds of acts to try and make himself more palatable to the average of New Yorker. So one possible future under a Mamdani, Meralty, will be that the party's radical leaders will alienate their most powerful comrade. And Mamdani himself will be freer to govern less ideologically.

Let's just say that's a best case scenario, but I am not convinced this will be the case. Mamdani has already gotten important endorsements from mainstream New York Democrats like Governor Kathy Hochel and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. As of press time, the only major New York Democrat to hold out is Senator Chuck Schumer. So instead of asking what success may mean for the DSA, perhaps we should ask what accommodation may mean for the Democratic Party. Will it go the way of SDS and the DSA itself, opening its doors to radicals only to find over time

that the radicals themselves prevail? That is the lesson that Michael Harrington once understood, way back in 1962, only to spend the rest of his life unlearning it. Mamdani, by all accounts, remains committed to his radical principles, as he told his comrades in 2023, he joined the party because they were the only ones willing to support the boycott sanction and divestment of Israel. How long will it take before Mamdani's new political party takes on the radicalism of his old one? in table sand

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