Democratic Socialism. Hope or Hopeless?

Throughline

This episode explores the life and political legacy of Michael Harrington, the author of 'The Other America.' It traces his evolution from a

Key takeaways

• Michael Harrington's book 'The Other America' revealed widespread, hidden poverty in the United States.
• Harrington advocated for a 'realignment' strategy to bring progressives into the Democratic Party.

Main topics

• Michael Harrington
• Democratic Socialism

Notable quotes

I used to think that the slaves really liked it under slavery.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound look at the tension between political

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey, what's your problem? No, seriously, are your grocery bills too high? Are you spending too much time on your phone? Maybe you're searching for a new job or you're trying to figure out how to set boundaries with your family. Whatever's on your mind, Life Kit has you covered with three episodes every week on health, money, mental health, and so much more. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (0:29) Georgetown University, November 19th, 2015. Speaker 5 (0:36) 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 Speaker 6 (1:04) you all for being out on this beautiful day. Speaker 5 (1:08) 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. Speaker 6 (1:28) 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. Speaker 5 (1:52) It's a safe bet to say most Americans listening to Sanders speak had never heard the term before. Speaker 4 (1:58) If you just type in Google, like, Democratic Socialism in America, DSA's going to come up. Speaker 5 (2:04) DSA, a political advocacy group. It's short for the Democratic Socialists of America. Speaker 5 (2:12) When Sanders gave that speech, the DSA only had 6,000 members. The Speaker 2 (2:18) average age was my generation. It was 60-something. Speaker 5 (2:22) 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. Speaker 4 (2:37) 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 Speaker 2 (2:50) provides a vehicle into which all of these new, eager, young recruits are drawn. Speaker 1 (2:57) This bill is a deal with the devil. Speaker 2 (3:01) Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Speaker 1 (3:04) President Trump. You're either being lied to or you are lying to the American people. My Speaker 2 (3:11) friends, Speaker 7 (3:12) we have toppled a political dynasty. Speaker 2 (3:17) 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. Speaker 8 (3:30) 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 Speaker 2 (3:43) suicide times 10. Speaker 5 (3:49) 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 Speaker 4 (4:07) the most well-known socialist in the United States. He was Mr. Socialism. Speaker 5 (4:13) Then and now, being labeled socialist in America? comes with a lot of strings attached. Speaker 8 (4:19) 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. Speaker 5 (4:31) 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. Speaker 5 (4:42) I'm Randa Abdel-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. Speaker 7 (5:19) Ohio, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. How Speaker 1 (5:26) do products end up on big box shelves? Well, we at Planet Money pitch the Planet Money board game. I'm trying not to think how much of a big deal it is and how much work has gone into it. It's Speaker 7 (5:36) really big. Is it helpful if I remind you how big it is? It's sort of the whole thing. We Speaker 1 (5:41) go inside the minds of the people who decide what goes on store shelves. Listen to Planet Money on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (5:50) This week on NPR's Newsmakers, Tucker Carlson has broken with President Trump over the war with Iran and says he warned the president to his face that the war would be a mistake. Speaker 6 (6:01) And he looked at me and said, yes, you're right. But in the end, we all die anyway. So it doesn't matter. Speaker 2 (6:08) Tucker Carlson, this week on NPR's Newsmakers. Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (6:15) This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. Each week, we go beyond the headlines and dive deep into an issue like the Epstein files, the dismantling of voting rights, and the conflicts abroad. Listen to Fresh Air interviews to better understand our world. Find us on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (6:39) Part one, Rerum Novarum, of revolutionary change. Speaker 5 (6:50) 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. Speaker 2 (7:05) He was an only son, much beloved. Speaker 5 (7:08) This is Morris Iserman, author of The Other American, The Life of Michael Harrington. Speaker 2 (7:14) His mother hoped he would become a priest. And Speaker 5 (7:18) 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... Speaker 4 (7:31) Taking care of the poor, you know, class harmony, and we should really deal with the excesses of capitalism. Speaker 5 (7:37) 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. Speaker 6 (8:09) of industrial enterprise lie on every side. Speaker 5 (8:12) Growing up, Michael didn't hear much about Debs or the socialists, but he did hear plenty about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We Speaker 6 (8:21) face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of national unity. Speaker 5 (8:29) 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 Speaker 4 (8:41) grows up in privilege. He's not super wealthy, but he's certainly not in the working class or very poor. Speaker 5 (8:47) Still, in Michael's home, Roosevelt was a hero. One Speaker 4 (8:51) 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. Speaker 5 (9:05) 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. Speaker 5 (9:19) 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. Speaker 2 (9:33) I came across editorials he wrote denouncing birth control. This is in the late 1940s. He Speaker 5 (9:39) was a believer. Speaker 2 (9:41) He was a true believer. Speaker 5 (9:43) 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, Speaker 2 (10:01) 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. Speaker 5 (10:12) He found himself gravitating towards books on philosophy. particularly those great French thinkers. People Speaker 4 (10:19) 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. Speaker 2 (10:32) And for a while, he wavered in his faith. Speaker 4 (10:35) 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 Speaker 5 (10:42) going to believe Speaker 4 (10:43) because it's absurd. Yes. Speaker 6 (10:45) 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. Speaker 4 (10:59) And he takes the plunge. Speaker 5 (11:04) 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. Speaker 4 (11:17) He joins Dorothea Day's Catholic worker movement. Speaker 8 (11:21) If they were hungry, feed them. If they were without clothes, find clothes for them. If they needed a place to stay, find Speaker 5 (11:27) some shelter for them. Dorothy Day co-founded a radical social justice movement known as the Catholic Workers during the Great Depression. Speaker 4 (11:36) She had actually been around the socialist and communist parties early in her life. Returns to the church and basically she works with the poor. Speaker 2 (11:44) By the 1950s, the population being served in the soup kitchens at the Catholic Worker tended to be a different kind of poor. Speaker 5 (11:52) While some were living the white picket fence, middle class dream, The Catholic workers were spending every day with this different kind of poor. Speaker 2 (12:01) Broken men, many with addictions, many alcoholics, whose poverty can be explained in terms of individual failings. Speaker 5 (12:10) 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. Speaker 2 (12:24) 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 Speaker 4 (12:32) most left-wing you could be in the Catholic Church. Speaker 5 (12:35) 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 Speaker 2 (12:45) the Catholic worker, he was known as the guy with the typewriter. Speaker 5 (12:48) Michael much preferred to spend his days sitting at that typewriter, writing articles for the Catholic worker newspaper. Speaker 2 (12:55) Had a circulation in the high 50,000s, you know, more than the nation or the New Republic at the time. Speaker 5 (13:02) He wrote about what he witnessed every day on the streets of New York City. Speaker 2 (13:06) He said, you know, there are a lot more poor people than