Throughline - Democratic Socialism. Hope or Hopeless?

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

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, 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.See 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

Georgetown University, November 19, 2015. 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. Thank you all for being out on this beautiful day. 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.

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. It's a safe bet to say most Americans listening to Sanders speak had never heard the term before. If you just type in Google, like democratic socialism in America, DSA is going to come up.

DSA, a political advocacy group. It's short for the Democratic Socialists of America. When Sanders gave that speech, the DSA only had 6,000 members. The average age was my generation. It was 60-something. 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. 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. It provides a vehicle into which all of these new, eager, young recruits are drawn. This bill is a deal with the devil. Alexander Ocasio-Cortez. President Trump,

you're either being lied to or you are lying to the American people. My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty. 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. Democratic socialists are celebrating another win in a key U.S. congressional primary ahead of the midterms. The barbarians are in the game. We will defeat the Communists. This is all part of an internal fight within the Democratic Party. This is political suicide times 10. 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 Probably the most well-known socialist in the United States. He was Mr. Socialism. Then and now, being labeled socialist in America comes with a lot of strings attached. 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 a society as it is.

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. I'm Randab del Fattah, and on this episode of ThruLine 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. This is Brian Gwynn from Cincinnati, Ohio, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Part 1. Rerum Navarum of Revolutionary Change. 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. He was an only son, much beloved.

This is Morris Iserman, author of The Other American, The Life of Michael Harrington. His mother hoped he would become a priest. 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 Reram Novarum. It called attention to the struggles of the working class

and advocated for taking care of the poor, you know, class harmony, and we should really deal the excesses of capitalism. 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. The Willard Leads of Industrial Enterprise lie on every side. Growing up, Michael didn't hear much about Debs or the socialists, but he did hear plenty about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of national unity. 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. He grows up in privilege. He's not super wealthy, but he's certainly not in the working class or very poor. Still, in Michael's home, Roosevelt was a hero. 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. By 1944,

Roosevelt and his New Deal had gotten the country through the worst economic disaster in its history, and now was leading it towards victory in a catastrophic world war. Michael, meanwhile,

too young to fight in that war, stayed in a kind of Catholic bubble all through his teen years. He went to a Jesuit all-boys high school, then College of the Holy Cross, where he took up writing for his college paper. I came across editorials he wrote announcing birth control, this is in the late 1940s. He was a believer. He was a true believer.

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... He was suddenly not surrounded by Catholics. He actually had a Protestant girlfriend from Wellesley, which he carefully didn't mention to his mother. And he began to read much more widely. He found himself gravitating towards books on philosophy, particularly those great French thinkers. People like Albert Camus, Pascal, and others.

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

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 gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. And he takes the plunge. 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. He joins Dorothy a day's Catholic worker movement. 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. She'd actually been around the socialists and communist parties early in her life, returns to the church, and basically she works with the poor. By the 1950s, the population being served in the soup kitchens at the Catholic worker tended to be a different kind of poor.

While some were living the white picket fence, middle-class dream, the Catholic workers were spending every day, with this different kind of poor. Broken men, many with addictions, many alcoholics, whose poverty keep being explained in terms of individual failings. 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.

Living in the Catholic worker house along with the poor, of the Lower East Side, working in their soup kitchen. He said it was the most left when you could be in the Catholic Church. 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. And the Catholic worker, he was known as the guy with the typewriter. Michael much preferred to spend his days sitting at that typewriter, writing articles for the Catholic worker newspaper.

At a circulation in the high 50,000, He wrote about the nation or the new republic at the time. He wrote about what he witnessed every day on the streets of New York City. He said, you know, there are a lot more poor people than most Americans think. Since he's a very articulate and intelligent, man, he speaks for the movement, he travels around. And he started to meet different people across the political spectrum, including... William F. Buckley, the famous American conservative. Buckley's very impressed by him.

But he also encounters members of the socialists. party. And they give him literature to read, Marx, Lenin, people like that. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a word to win. After a couple of years with the Catholic workers, he just couldn't seem to shake those doubts he'd stuffed down. By 1952, returned to his crisis of faith, and finally left the church. But he never lost that I think really profound moral basis.

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. He likes this idea of people living for something transcendent, something bigger than themselves. 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. One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many. The thing is, the early 50s wasn't exactly the best time to be getting involved in leftist movements. This is the height of McCarthyism.

The Cold War was underway. Anyone seen as too red, too communist, or anything that resembled it, was a target. 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. But Michael was new to this world and trying to figure out what brand of radical he was

and what his new North Star should be. Then he meets a guy named Max Schachman, a leader in the socialism scene. Shackman was an immigrant from the Russian Empire, a one-time fan of Soviet communism who grew disillusioned because of the targeting of dissent. Shackman is like, it's a new evil empire, and we can't support it.

Shackman realigned to a new worldview, democratic socialism, a political philosophy that had been around in some form since the 1800s. For Schackman, 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. They see themselves as aligned with the West. It's like it's a patriotic socialism.

Yes. And Harrington's actually very explicit about that. He says, at one point in the late 50s, you can't be a socialist without loving America. What a line, right? You can't be a socialist without loving America. Does that mean you're just going to whitewash the crimes

of the American government and imperialism? 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 fix it. it. All of this was very much still hypothetical to him, a thought experiment. But that would soon

change. Coming up, he became very much a believer in the positive role that the state, the government, could play. Michael Harrington test the limits of what's possible. Hi, this is Regina from Washington, D.C. You're listening to ThruLine with NPR. Part two, the man who discovered poverty. Let me say first that I accept the nomination of the Democratic Party. 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. Michael Harrington was there.

Sort of. He was standing just outside the convention, alongside 5,000. and other civil rights activists, picketing, demanding a stronger civil rights plank in the Democratic Party. 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. But years of living in New York, witnessing poverty, opened his eyes to just how bad the situation was for black Americans in particular, and helped build the bridge in his mind between economic welfare and social justice.

Harrington got more and more involved in the movement, organizing sit-ins and marches, and eventually a protest outside the DNC. And we stand today on the edge of a new frontier. Standing in the crowd alongside him were heavy hitters of the movement, Roy Wilkins, Marion Berry, and of course Martin Luther King Jr., He had met Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1960 at the Democratic National Convention.

Harrington had actually been assigned to pick up King from the airport the day before the convention and take him to his hotel. He said he was very moved to realize that King was actually a year younger than the U.S. 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 best-selling book he publishes in 1962. The Other America. The Other America. Most Americans have just known a time of, good food, presence, and family. They probably think that's the way all Americans live, but it's not true.

Tens of millions of Americans are poor, miserable in body and in spirit. The other America's origins were in a couple of articles that Mike wrote for Commentary Magazine. At the time, a very liberal magazine today, a very conservative magazine. articles that saw Mike do a deep dive into the U.S. census to make an argument that poverty was much more widespread than most people assumed. You'll see people saying, like, the United States has overcome poverty. They tended to talk about it in terms that minimized its extent, pockets of poverty. Harrington found that the reality was twofold. Yes, government programs and unions have lifted millions out of poverty, but that progress

was distributed unequally, certainly racially unequally. The different groups that he looked at included African Americans. To work at 58% of the white wage. Native Americans was unusual at that time to talk about Native American poverty. Hispanic Americans. There are farm workers. There are workers in the coal fields who jobs have been destroyed by our country. The elderly.

Who are not only poor in income, but who are sick, who are living alone. He believes that poverty constitutes a separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life. Somewhere between a quarter and a third, depending on how you counted, of the American population, fell below the officially established poverty line. And he proposes a solution. The federal government should launch a 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. 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. 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. And he had a particular reader in mind. The other America was not a book written for poor people. That is to say, he didn't have to convince poor people. that they were poor. They knew that. Who he was writing for was the middle-class American,

who assumed that they were living in an affluent society. Those are the people who wield disproportionate political clout. You know, traditionally, Marxist, socialist, 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. He does not, not see that at all as the path. These benevolent rulers, enlightened liberals, they're the people who are essentially going to deliver things. When the other America was released, crickets. At first, this book could have just fallen through the cracks. No one wouldn't read it. 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. 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. The review outlines in no uncertain terms, just how bad the situation is. The worst part of being old and poor in this country is the loneliness. So this actually gets the book to sell well. Now, everyone was talking about it. He was suddenly being invited as a speaker around the country.

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 he was regarded as a close and welcome advisor. We didn't use jargon. No mention of the proletariat or the masses. 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. And pretty soon, people were calling him the man who discovered poverty. Meanwhile, the country was reeling from the assassination of President Kennedy. At 238 in the forward cabin of Air Force One, a necessary ceremony. Which catapulted his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, into the presidency. Johnson was an immensely complicated man, intensely ambitious. He'd grown up near poverty in Texas,

taught poorer Mexican-American children, and deeply admired FDR. He wanted to accomplish what Roosevelt had in, an interracial democracy with prosperity for all people. In an odd way, Michael Harrington was an ally for a brief moment with Lyndon Johnson. I wanted some of the same things. One day, Harrington gets a call from a Johnson aide who says,

Come down for consultation in Washington about this legislation that Lyndon Johnson is going to announce at the end of January in a state of the union address. He's very excited. Like, this is someone who, until the other America, didn't really have steady employment. So Harrington goes down and then spends several weeks in these high-level consultations. It's kind of amazed when they're throwing around the nuns. numbers of what they can do on this program and that program. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars. There's random Greenwich Village socialist is, you know, suddenly rubbing elbows with chief strategists

within the New Johnson administration. And he called himself a socialist, right? They knowingly invited a socialist. They knowingly invited a socialist. I mean, they didn't, like, issue press release, say, oh, Michael Harrington, the well-known, notorious socialist is helping shape this leg. but they weren't afraid of it. And not long after these meetings, in January 1964,

LBJ announced his war on poverty to the world. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. That year, Harrington voted for LBJ in the presidential election. He now had a front row seat to power, and made some tangible impact. And although he's still a leader in the Socialist Party, his thinking has shifted.

Maybe the only real path to change in America is to work from within the system. 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. He argued that the goal should be

to realign the Democratic Party. That was the term used, realignment. Bring new voters, especially black voters, into the party and push white Southern Democrats out of the party. We've been blocking particularly civil rights legislation, but lots of other progressive legislation for a generation. Harrington sees the student movement, the civil rights movement, the workers movement. Having the potential for building a new leftist majority within the Democratic Party, which he definitely sees as a possibility by 1964 and 1965. 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.

It must have seemed to him like a tremendously hopeful moment. You know, even a half decade earlier would have been almost impossible to imagine. F. Buckley, Jr. Tonight, a war on poverty. Hope or hope? Harrington was launched into the public eye, becoming an unofficial spokesperson for the White House. Harrington is actually the first guest on Buckley's A firing line when it premieres the 60s talking about the great society programs. 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 an 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. How do you define poverty for purposes of the poverty program? Well, it's not how I define it. It's how the government does.

I'm more interested in your definition. Okay, mine's the government's because it's become very precise. The government usually does what you tell it. Oh, not at all. This idea of the Other America that Harrington had released into the world, it spread. The Other America. Even finding its way into the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.

Martin Luther King used to choke with him. You know, Mike, we didn't know we were poor. until we read your book. After their first meeting on the eve of the DNC, Harrington had grown closer to King, becoming... Entrusted advisor, he met with King at various places in the South. Do you think MLK would have called himself a Democratic Socialist? MLK did call himself a Democratic Socialist.

He just didn't do it outside of 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. But by 1967, King's rhetoric was becoming more forceful. Some might say more radical on poverty. Organizing a poor people's campaign. 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. There comes a time when silence is betrayal. He's condemning the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. And he criticized himself. He said this was troubling his conscience that he had toned down what he really believed in the hopes of retaining communication with the White House. The same White House that had pushed the war on poverty and passed the Civil Rights Act

was also dropping bombs on poor people, innocent people, thousands of miles away. Harrington, also a pacifist, made a different choice. a compromise. He felt that if he spoke out too directly, too loudly, he would lose whatever influence he had. The Johnson administration. But Harrington would soon discover there was also a cost to not speaking out. That's coming up. Hi, this is Melba in Springfield, Georgia, and you are listening to Rulin.

from NPR. Part 3. The Left Wing of the Possible. Seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. 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. A grim battle for possession of the B.C.'s bunkers about possibly... Bloodied American soldiers, Vietnamese women and children, maimed, displaced, killed. Now they have nothing but one good meal a day. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking out. If I'm going to die, I'll die now, right here fighting you. Muhammad Ali was speaking out, casting the war as part of their same struggle.

You're my enemy. My name is the white people, not vehicles, Chinese, or Japanese. You my opposing when I want freedom. You my opponent when I want justice. Even Mick Jagger was singing about revolution. You see an explosion of the student movement. Engaged in, like, street fighting, mass protests. 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. I shall not see and I will not accept. the nomination of my party for another term as your president. It was an election year. LBJ had already decided not to run for re-election, even before two assassinations rock the country. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis tonight.

In the ambassador hotel last night, Senator Kennedy was shot. This upsets the political establishment in many respects and opens up the Democratic Party to different candidates. And on college campuses, students were pushing hard for the anti-war candidate, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy. How many men must die to justify some 23,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands? In the end, Harrington chose to back LBJ's vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Who is pro-war?

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. Pretty much the only excuse that Harrington has is, well, he's not a Republican. 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. I was 17 in 1968, and I was outraged. I didn't see voting for someone like Hubert Humphrey as at all acceptable. Morris Isseerman was then part of SCS, students for Democratic Society, the main student activist group of the era. Ultimately, Hubert Humphrey doesn't win. As for Harrington, a lot of the students brand him a sellout. Wasn't even on my radar screen anymore, precisely because he wasn't standing up at these big anti-war rallies and adding his voice to ours. SDS is going to move to basically being openly Marxist-Leninist within a short time.

This is far into Harrington. He's really not liking this. He wants to build a new majority within the Democratic Party. And he sees all of this as destructive, ultra-leftism, sectarian. I think you faced a genuine dilemma. 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. I watched the organization and tear itself apart in a frenzy of sectarian conflict.

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. I agree. It's not a coincidence. And you also have a lot of people in the political establishment are like, we got to pull out. But some in the Socialist Party pushed back, including Harrington's old mentor, Max Schackman. 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 Dysok. The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. Let me begin with a crack by famous remark by Will Rogers. I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat. 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. He thinks, okay, all these, the anti-war movement and other movements, we want to basically give them a place to go. 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. I had heard him speak on a number of occasions in the 1970s, and I was looking for reasons to disagree with him. Morris remembers being in the crowd feeling skeptical. Like, there's no way this guy is going to win me over. He would always at the start of a speech, say, I have three points I want to make. It was always three points.

He always held his speeches down to about how. half hour. Pascal talks about the necessity of making a wager on God. I would argue somewhat analysis that there's no way to prove that socialism is making. And he would take questions. One night, Morris decided to ask the question that had been bothering him since 1968.

I asked in a hostile tone, should you have supported Hubert Humphrey? He said, yeah, I've explained why. Morris still disagreed. But now he could understand the murkiness of it all. 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. So that helped make me a Michael Harrington socialist.

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 Dysak 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. What's unusual on the left for merges to take place?

Before merging, they did have to resolve one big disagreement. Some of them are a bit more pro-Palestinian than Harrington is. Marenton 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. And the Palestinian question? How did he view that?

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. The more pro-Palestinian NAM members eventually moved past that because the key issue for them was getting rid of Reagan. Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

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

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. First and perhaps foremost to my mind is the fact that America has the most heterogeneous working class in the world. So millions of people knew him. 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. Jesse Jackson, the Rainbow Coalition. The white, Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer,

the business person, the environmentless, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled, make up the American quilt. Harrington thought that Jesse Jackson was a little too militant, maybe a little too soft on communism at times. 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. 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. But Harrington did end up backing Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential run. I think that Harrington was speaking had some of Jackson's campaign events by then.

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.

Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won. Reagan might not have even known it. That feels like a real kind of attack on. on Harrington and his life's work. Yeah, and it was untrue. 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. So poverty got a second chance, but it wasn't the fault of the war on poverty. Harrington died in 1989, at age 61, after a second chance. a battle with esophageal cancer.

Less than two years later, a little-known mayor from Vermont named Bernie Sanders was elected to Congress. 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. Harrington's response? He would ask God why he mumbled. That is, why he didn't get his message across more clearly. 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 ten 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, Democratic Socialism.

Morris Sisserman says while Sanders deserves credit for reviving interests in Harrington's DSA, the seeds had been planted earlier. 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. 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. Echoes of the questions and battles that Harrington faced can be heard all around us today.

It's hard to know what Harrington would make of today's DSA and its most vocal supporters like Zoran Mamdani, especially when it comes to one of the biggest issues driving the movement right now, Israel-Palestine. A statement on its website reads, quote, DSA stands for the full freedoms and self-determination of the Palestinian people, including the end of Israel's colonization and occupation of all Arab lands, and goes on to say, our role is to end U.S. complicity in Israel, Israel's genocide and apartheid at every level. 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 life. And I imagine if he stayed with us for another four decades, he would have continued to change. Harrington held on to the belief that in the long run, the Democratic Party could change too.

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

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 DSA and on AOC, because they really represent his vision of a left wing of the possible. The American people, I believe, are going to wake up and understand that the dream is over. The House of Cards has collapsed. Will the left be able to take advantage of the moment? 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 Adablui. This episode was produced by me and... Julia Redpath. Molly Marcello. Sarah Wyman. Amy Padula.

Leanna Simstrom. Irene Noguchi. This episode was fact-checked by Kevin Vocal. It was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music by Ramtinada Blue and his band, Drop Electric. Thanks also to Tom Pyle, Florian Hotel, Spencer Wetzel, Ulyse Gose, Antoine Jorogel, Johannes Durgy and Josie Ghetto. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard,

call 872-588-8-805 and leave a voicemail. Don't forget to tell us your name, where you're calling from, and please say you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. I'm Randaab del Fattah. Thanks for listening.