Michael Harrington submitted his resignation from Social Democrats USA on June 21, 1973, in a dramatic five-page letter. With the exception of references to Vietnam, Harrington’s letter portrayed his break with the Shachtmanites as not over general perspective but tactics:
The broad framework of my analysis of Communism—as a bureaucratic collectivist system that is both anti-capitalist and anti-socialist—is the same as that of the present leadership of SDUSA. But, as a Socialist, I believe that Communism must be countered by democratic alternatives, not by the dictatorial regimes America has backed in Saigon. . . . Socialism in America as represented by the SD is completely isolated from the entire middle class reform movement as well as from the unions, representing well over five million workers and the most politically active sector of the labor movement, who broke with Meany over the war and McGovern. . . . In presenting this resignation, then, I do not abandon the tradition of Debs and Thomas. On the contrary I take a step that will permit me—and those who agree with me—to extend and deepen that tradition among workers, reformers, the minorities, the women’s movement and other partisans of social change. In the name of the future of the American Socialist movement, I resign from Social Democrats USA.1
Earlier that year, in February 1973, Harrington and his closest confidants such as Irving Howe, Bogdan Denitch, and Deborah Meier had laid plans to launch what they decided to call the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). They hoped with this name to invoke both a sense of modesty and the “organizing committees” of the CIO in the 1930s. They immediately hired a full-time organizer, Jack Clark, a former YPSL member at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, who worked out of a spare room in Meier’s large Upper West Side townhouse.2 A week before formally submitting his resignation from SDUSA, Harrington wrote to the Socialist International to inform them of the intention of DSOC to apply for membership.3 DSOC held its founding convention in New York on October 20 with more than four hundred in attendance. There Harrington earnestly announced, “Today we begin the work of building the seventies left.” Interpreted by some as a self-deprecating paraphrase of Lenin’s declaration, “We shall now build the socialist order,” it was more notably a clear indication that he still viewed politics through rigid and doctrinaire categories. Harrington announced his program bluntly: “We must go where the people are, which is the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.”4
In this ambitious effort to replicate a social democratic version of the 1930s Popular Front, Harrington began with an indispensable ally in the unions with which he collaborated in the Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace. Led by Emil Mazey, a veteran UAW left-winger going back to the 1930s, and Victor Gotbaum, who led the State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) of New York, this union base grew into the effective DSOC bloc in the AFL-CIO. After the tragic death of Walter Reuther in a plane crash in 1970, Leonard Woodcock, who once briefly served on the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, succeeded him as president of the UAW; Woodcock was succeeded in turn by loyal DSOC friend Doug Fraser. Victor Reuther joined the leadership of DSOC along with such survivors of the UAW Socialist bloc as Emil Mazey, Martin Gerber, and Irving Bluestone. AFSCME was led nationally by a 1930s YPSL member named Jerry Wurf, who declared his support for DSOC out of passionate resentment of the Shachtmanites in George Meany’s inner circle. Unmistakably resembling the historic Socialist bloc in the prewar labor movement, this DSOC bloc grew to include other labor leaders such as William Winpisinger of the Machinists, Ralph Helstein of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, and Jacob Sheinkman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.5
Among veterans of the Thomas-era Socialist Party to declare for DSOC, the most prominent by far was Harry Fleischman, lending unparalleled historical legitimacy. The vice chairs of DSOC included Victor Reuther, Ralph Helstein, Julius Bernstein, Carl Shier, and Deborah Meier; other founding board members included Fleischman, Irving Howe, and former YPSL Harrington loyalists such as Steve Kelman and Ben Ross from Harvard and Alex Spinrad from Yale. But there was no denying that for all practical purposes, DSOC was Michael Harrington, who never lost the sense of celebrity he gained from writing The Other America; and was now a professor at Queens College and a board member of the proud but declining Americans for Democratic Action.6 Yet Harrington took a passive approach to wielding political influence, allowing the character of his promising new movement to be shaped by those who came into it. In a harbinger of things to come, when Deborah Meier hosted a reception to conclude the founding convention of DSOC, Harrington spent the entire evening under interrogation by several female delegates for his lack of feminist bona fides.7
During the founding convention, Harrington made an earnest plea for the quarrels of the 1960s to be laid to rest, and many aimless veterans of SDS and groups yet further left were present to give him a hearing. The most consequential was Ron Radosh, who wrote a generally favorable report on the conference for Socialist Revolution, a magazine that was the nominal successor to Studies on the Left. Radosh, still in transition from the new left to what DSOC proposed replacing it with, shrewdly and prophetically observed,
Ironically, one result of the DSOC might be the very united front with the Communists that Harrington’s older associates have sought to avoid for so many years. Since the electoral strategy of working within the Democratic Party is similar to that of the American Communists—except that the Communists persist in hiding their socialist views—the DSOC members might find the Communists their closest allies in the fight to liberalize the Democratic Party. Perhaps this was in the minds of some of those present. When the question of the political significance of Chile was raised in plenary session, Harrington noted that the DSOC might have to re-evaluate socialist views about Communist parties. In Chile, Harrington stated, the Communist Party “functioned like a social democratic party.” Harrington clearly supported the moderate and constitutionalist line of the Chilean CP, and was critical of both the MIR and the left wing of Allende’s Socialist Party. Realizing that the world has moved away from the 1930s, Harrington seemed open to some degree of unity with those Communists who are clearly liberal reformers.8
Radosh was ultimately won over by Harrington over lunch and an old-fashioned Greenwich Village bull session, the first new left veteran to be brought on to the national board of DSOC. Irving Howe and a few others loudly protested the move, but soon larger waves of new left refugees began entering DSOC.9 James Weinstein also became a supporter as he launched a new topical publication, In These Times.
DSOC would not intervene in the crowded Democratic presidential primaries of 1976, though Harrington personally endorsed Morris Udall of Arizona when he became the last liberal standing against Jimmy Carter. Unions close to DSOC such as the UAW and AFSCME endorsed Carter as he was swept to the nomination by liberals who feared Scoop Jackson and by Southerners who feared George Wallace.10 The major efforts of DSOC in 1976 focused on influencing the Democratic platform. In 1974, Harrington and a few others had been elected as delegates to the first of the “midterm” conventions mandated by the Democratic Party reforms that sprang from the debacle of 1968, but they were consigned to the margins.11 In February 1976, DSOC launched a new broad-based front group, Democratic Agenda, with generous funding and support from its labor movement allies. The founding convention was addressed by William Winpisinger of the Machinists and Congressman John Conyers of Michigan.12 The major legislative campaign of Democratic Agenda was for the “Full Employment Bill” proposed by Hubert Humphrey and California congressman Gus Hawkins in 1975.
With liberal dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter already rising, the Democratic Agenda conference in Washington in November 1977 indicated great growth potential. Four members of Congress now openly identified with DSOC: John Conyers, Bella Abzug, Ron Dellums of California (nephew of the West Coast leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters), and Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin. Other speakers included Victor Reuther, Doug Fraser, William Winpisinger, Jerry Wurf, James Farmer, feminist icon Gloria Steinem, Joyce Miller and William Lucy from the AFL-CIO, and future congressman Barney Frank, then a Massachusetts state legislator who frequently appeared at local DSOC functions in Boston. A flyer promoting the conference openly blasted Carter, declaring “there is no alternative to full employment” and emphasizing that Carter was elected “on a full employment platform.”13 The official program for the conference boldly announced,
The Democratic Agenda is the beginning of a movement to make sure that President Carter and the Democratic Congress keep the promises contained in the 1976 Democratic Platform—like guaranteed jobs for all, eliminating billions of dollars of tax loopholes for the rich and the giant corporations, an end to discrimination by race and sex, national health insurance, and housing, health and environmental programs. A new lease on life for the major cities, and ending the rip-offs by the oil companies, electric utilities, big banks and defense contractors. The Democratic Agenda is a coalition to prevent a sellout of these promises.14
By 1978, John Judis of In These Times could boast, “DSOC’s 3,000 or so activists have managed to play a role in the Democratic Party roughly commensurate to that of the 300,000 strong American Conservative Union within the Republican Party,” though Maurice Isserman hastens to add, “This was a measure both of DSOC’s success and of American liberalism’s disarray.”15 The peak of political influence came at the Democratic midterm convention that year in Memphis, when Democratic Agenda succeeded in getting the necessary signatures of a full quarter of the delegates for their four proposed floor resolutions, including an unambiguous condemnation of the entire record of the Carter administration:
The problems which confronted this nation in 1976 have not been solved, yet it appears that the fiscal year 1980 budget will cut many social programs below “current services” levels, while allowing the military budget to grow. The proposed reductions, together with current economic policies, may well result in a recession and a rising unemployment rate in 1980—in direct violation of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act.16
Among the floor whips who helped Carter avert an absolute calamity in Memphis was the ambitious First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The convention was widely seen as foreshadowing the expected primary challenge to Carter by Ted Kennedy, although Carter’s press secretary insisted, “The dispute is not between the President and Senator Kennedy, but between the administration and the Democratic Agenda.” Mike Harrington and Doug Fraser were now the acknowledged leaders of the movement organizing to deny renomination to Carter. When the New York Times wrote in an editorial that the Memphis convention was “a firm indication of the schism between the White House and the liberal wing of the party,” an exuberant Harrington was convinced that he was fulfilling the original vision of realignment of his comrades a generation earlier.17
Harrington launched a formal campaign to draft Ted Kennedy into the presidential race on April 5, 1979, at a rally before a large crowd and with much fanfare at Faneuil Hall in Boston.18 Though Kennedy was always the favorite to make the run against Carter, at least one meeting Harrington attended saw such other names suggested as Morris Udall, George McGovern, and New York governor Hugh Carey.19 H. L. Mitchell, who remained an officer of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, even suggested that Harrington himself throw his hat in the Democratic ring.20 But Harrington’s reasons for insisting on Kennedy were many. Not only was Harrington’s moment of glory in national politics bound up with the Kennedy name, but the martyrdom of Robert Kennedy, and the myth surrounding his hypothetical presidency, was an important touchstone uniting the disparate fragments of both old left and new left that regrouped into DSOC. Moreover, it was generally assumed by the political class throughout the 1970s that the Democratic nomination, and even the presidency, was Ted Kennedy’s for the asking whenever he wanted it. No small number of aspiring liberal policy makers in Washington were even joining DSOC, believing it would give them entrée to a future Ted Kennedy administration.
Yet Harrington felt a compelling pull to atone for both his real and imagined sins of the 1960s against the new left. Oddly occurring in parallel with the high hopes of the 1970s for DSOC was its prospective merger with an organization of new left veterans known as the New American Movement (NAM). Ron Radosh helped found the small NAM affiliate in New York and arranged its earliest public dialogue with DSOC.21 In These Times made a point of maintaining friendly relations with both organizations, and joint action was common by the late 1970s, particularly in the Midwest where NAM was most well organized.22 The eventual merger of DSOC and NAM essentially fulfilled the prediction Radosh made at the founding convention of DSOC—that replicating the Popular Front model of organization and activism would ultimately lead to an embrace of the spirit and legacy of the original Popular Front.
The story of NAM is, to a very large extent, the story of how the remnants of the new left were converted over the course of the 1970s to a markedly different program. When it was founded in 1971 by a large group of SDS veterans and the circle around Studies on the Left, it was committed to a traditional new left perspective and to organizing a new third party. Michael Lerner, who wrote the first declaration of principles for NAM (he later became a rabbi and founder of Tikkun magazine), described the group’s founding and his early disillusionment in what can easily serve as the whole story of the new left:
I wanted this organization to overcome the anti-intellectualism that had come into fashion in SDS around 1968 and cease romanticizing the anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggles that had led to a fawning acceptance of anything that came from nonwhite sources no matter how immoral or self-destructive. During my time in Seattle, I found my own organizing undermined by these tendencies . . . my goal when creating NAM was gathering people who wanted precisely what I had started in Seattle—namely, an organization that spoke to the majority of Americans whose needs were being shortchanged by the government and society, and who were growing increasingly angry at a government that was spending their taxes for war and for the interests of the ruling elites of the society. I argued that NAM should appeal and speak to the interests of working people, that it should advocate a different kind of society, one no longer privileging the interests of capital, and that the movement advocating for such a society should be explicit in its democratic socialist vision as well as anti-imperialist and anti-racist in its analysis. But when talking about socialism, I insisted that the movement must explicitly reject the dictatorships that emerged in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. . . . As it turned out, a much wider variety of people attended that first conference. Apart from the anti-leadership types, there was another group heavily represented in Davenport: refugees from the Communist Party USA. They sought another home but insisted that NAM should not critique what they called “real existing socialism” in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, or what I called “the willful misuse of socialist ideals for the sake of maintaining power by a dictatorial elite.” Then there was a section of socialist feminist activists who resented that this organization was pulled together by two males and a “male-identified” female (my partner Theirrie). We knew that these tendencies existed in new left members, but we imagined that their disagreements with us would lead them to ignore and denounce our efforts rather than cause them to show up and take over what we had started.23
Leading these Communist Party refugees into NAM was Richard Healey, an SDS veteran who personally recruited his mother, a recently expelled CP leader.24 Dorothy Healey was for many years the best known leader of the Communist Party in California, remaining in the party after the events of 1956. But after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Healey and a few other party leaders of her generation resigned.
In any other Communist Party among the western democracies, Dorothy Healey and her allies would have probably prevailed in steering it toward what was increasingly known as “Euro-Communism,” the adoption of reformist and parliamentary methods for only somewhat modified ends. There are a few likely reasons why the American Communist Party resisted the rise of Euro-Communism: the need of the Soviet Union to maintain a recruiting ground for espionage, the aura of martyrdom surrounding the leadership after the 1950s, and perhaps a distorted Soviet view of the Black Panthers and SDS, leading them to believe Maoism was their major competitor on the American scene. As it happened, by the late 1970s, NAM effectively became the American branch of the Euro-Communist phenomenon. How profound a change this was for the movement that began with the Port Huron Statement and Studies on the Left may have been best illustrated by the case of Jerry Rubin. Perhaps the most notorious wild man of 1960s radicalism, by the end of the 1970s Rubin wrote excitedly about the growing number of prominent aging ex-Communists recruited into NAM.25
The causes of this change in the outlook of so many veterans of 1960s radicalism were many and complex. Several memoirs by ex-Communists who left the party after 1956 or 1968 were published just after the collapse of SDS, and the sympathy expressed in these memoirs for the youth of the new left was naturally returned in kind. The leading memoir, indeed, was by Al Richmond, Dorothy Healey’s collaborator in breaking with the CP. Many also sought to atone for sins of anti-Americanism and hostility to the labor movement. For aspiring new left historians looking for a “usable past” consistent with this aim, the Communists in the CIO appeared to be the irresistible choice—the constituency of the white backlash organized into “progressive” unions, the patriotic vanguard in the good war against fascism who were Cold War liberalism’s first victims. During this period, Ron Radosh was researching a new history of the Rosenberg atomic espionage case and was shaken by the deep hostility he encountered to even a qualified belief in their guilt. As SDS veteran Mark Naison bluntly explained the romantic appeal of American Communism to new left survivors in a letter to Radosh, “The Rosenbergs knew how to die, they knew how to sacrifice for their comrades . . . it is no accident that people like this were the ones who fought the Scottsboro battles, built the unions, put their bodies on the line.”26
Probably no one was more alarmed by the emergence of this new romance for the Popular Front than the dean of the historians of American Communism, Theodore Draper. The phenomenon had probably already passed its peak when Draper published his lengthy two-part polemic against the new left historians in the New York Review of Books in 1985, skillfully dissembling what he termed a peculiar new leftist “cult of social history.”27 Significantly, of the ten published letters to the editor responding to Draper’s polemic, the one to offer unqualified support came from Murray Bookchin, perhaps the leading anarchist of the new left, who recalled his own youth in the 1930s Communist Party with dread:
I have seen very little in the self-styled “social history” of American Communism . . . that address themselves to the steady diet of trials, debasing “self-criticism,” and humiliating “confessions” that were demanded from members who were simply suspected of associating with politically suspect individuals on the independent left. . . . Far from reflecting the American radical tradition, American Communism poisoned the idealism of an entire generation of thirties radicals. The self-styled “social historians” of American Communism . . . legitimate this moral debasement of a rich tradition by “personalizing” it and dressing it in the raiments of sweet nostalgia.28
Draper overstated his case that the Popular Front was merely a “four-year interlude” in the history of American Communism; even in its most militant and sectarian periods after the Second World War, the Communist Party bore a far closer resemblance to the Popular Front than to the fanatical “third period” at the peak of the Great Depression. Indeed, the most profound consequence of the embrace of the Popular Front as a usable past, which Draper nevertheless recognized, was that because the Popular Front represented a de-radicalization from the historic American left, its embrace by a new generation of middle-aged radicals amounted to their assent to the rightward drift of American politics. As DSOC and NAM were negotiating their merger, there was little resistance in the latter group to Mike Harrington’s definition of what he called “the left wing of the possible,” which really meant the left wing of the Kennedy campaign.
For his part, Harrington made no effort to offer an alternative “usable past,” and indeed, his biases left him unable even if he wished to. The extent of Harrington’s salutary neglect in this department was best illustrated in his answer to the request of Ron Radosh for an endorsement of his book on the Rosenberg case: “I always knew they were guilty, but we’re trying to get former Communists who have left the party but are still pro-Soviet into our organization, and I can’t do anything to alienate them.”29 Yet Radosh made a critical early contribution to ensuring that this lack of an alternative usable past would occur. In the early 1970s, before abandoning a traditional new left perspective, Radosh published Prophets on the Right, a study of the works of Charles Beard, Oswald Garrison Villard, John Flynn, and Lawrence Dennis. Because of the original fatal blinders of Radosh and Studies on the Left were these men categorized as being on “the right” at all—to one degree or another they were all fellow travelers of the Socialist Party. Writing in Libertarian Review, James J. Martin expressed his shock at this conceit while generally praising the book, adding:
It has yet to be proven that the system that has evolved in America in the last century can work without reliance upon war of some kind. We need more attention to the domestic dependence upon war as an unemployment blotter and engine of “prosperity” and less to florid raving about the necessity of putting down planetary political transgression. . . . Is it only a coincidence that the business collapse and mounting unemployment of the last year or so have come on the heels of the phasing out of the Vietnam War and the thawing of the Cold War?30
This was exactly the sort of perspective verboten in the new Popular Front envisioned by Michael Harrington. Not a mere problematic isolated chapter in the story of American Socialism, the legacy of isolationism was only the most conspicuous example of the larger underlying problem. Harrington and his collaborators had little choice but to assent to the embrace of the legacy of the Popular Front because no other conceivable usable past—certainly not the 1930s Socialist Party and allied Farmer-Labor Party movement—was adaptable to their project of boring from within organized liberalism while not even identifying with its most radical wing. As even Irving Howe, no slouch assailing the baleful legacy of American Communism, was forced to conclude,
The irony of it all, a bitter enough irony, is that the most promising approach of the American left, one that apparently came closest to recognizing native realities, derives from the very movement that has done the most to discredit and besmirch the whole idea of the left. . . . If ever we are to see a resurgent democratic left in America, it will have more to learn tactically from the Popular Front initiated by the Stalinists than from those political ancestors whose integrity we admire.31
This argument was certainly debatable, but what it illustrated was the most fundamental victory achieved by the Communist Party and the Popular Front by marginalizing the Socialist Party in the 1930s: that any alternative means of organization would be all but inconceivable to future generations of American radicals, no matter how different their politics.
It was not necessarily the determination of Harrington and DSOC to work within the Democratic Party that was at fault. Rather, Harrington insisted on identifying not with the left wing of the liberal establishment but with the liberal establishment itself. It is not clear exactly how much this disposition was due to mere opportunism and how much the result of long-standing Shachtmanite conceits. But what was lacking in any case was an abiding Socialist perspective to distinguish DSOC from organized liberalism and take a longer view than one or two election cycles. This had been the abiding goal, whatever their faults, of James Weinstein and his colleagues around Studies on the Left. But Michael Harrington could not look beyond the New Deal and the Kennedy myth. Of course, a mainstream liberal narrative would have been likely to prevail with post–Cold War liberalism in any event. But Harrington was presumed, not least by himself, to stand for something more distinct and transcendent, something that in the final accounting he never really even attempted to provide.
Late in 1979, a Committee Against the NAM Merger was organized by Ben Ross and Alex Spinrad, youthful 1960s acolytes of Harrington who were present at the creation of DSOC but now watched it drift in a direction they found unnerving. As if to accentuate the identity crisis bedeviling this new right wing of DSOC, the Committee named its newsletter “Mainstream.” It attracted substantial support throughout the ranks of DSOC. Harlan Baker, a DSOC member in the Maine legislature, wrote bluntly that as an elected official he could not abide an organization that prioritized “community organizing” over political action.32 Yet of DSOC’s most prominent political supporters and labor movement allies, only Jacob Sheinkman spoke out against the merger, describing NAM as “diametrically opposed to any concept of democracy, let alone socialism as I know it.”33
But a majority of the young DSOC cadre who fought the merger probably had as their overriding concern that DSOC remain unfailingly partisan to the State of Israel. A few outliers in NAM identified with pro-Palestinian activism, but the mostly Jewish aging ex-Communists in NAM identified with their old left-wing Zionist comrade Morris Schappes and his magazine Jewish Currents. The one substantial policy difference between DSOC and NAM was the latter’s call for recognition of and negotiations with the PLO, a policy supported by the majority of parties in the Socialist International.34 But the maximalist tone of the Committee Against the NAM Merger was largely set by a Zionist ideologue named Eric Lee, who published a bibliography in his vanity journal giving inordinate space to “the national question” to promote Zionist authors, that included an attack on Karl Kautsky’s anti-Nazi pamphlet “Are the Jews a Race?” for “condemning Social Democracy to an anti-Zionist position for decades.”35
Irving Howe, who earlier in the decade had achieved considerable celebrity as author of the definitive popular history of the Jews of the Lower East Side, World of Our Fathers, emerged as the elder statesman of the opponents of the NAM merger, retaining a deep distrust of anyone who embraced the legacy of the Communist movement he bitterly opposed in his youth. Howe no doubt felt somewhat uneasy about the militancy for Israel among his youthful admirers. After co-editing a volume of pro-Israel essays with Carl Gershman early in the 1970s, by the 1980s Howe was slowly but surely backing away from this posture and could be withering in his attacks on the American Jewish establishment.36 But more disturbing to Howe, at heart a 1930s YPSL Trotskyist to the end, was the fascination that some of those who fought against the merger developed with the Socialist Old Guard of the 1930s and its struggles. Alex Spinrad even paid a visit to a superannuated Louis Waldman in his law office, who was amused to hear of the antics of his young friend.37
The position ultimately adopted in the merger was support for negotiations with the PLO with an explicit commitment to supporting American military aid to Israel.38 Yet DSOC demanded no such explicit commitment in any other case. If Michael Harrington could be credited for reuniting the old left and the new left, an explicit commitment to American military aid anywhere conclusively demonstrated that a condition of that reunification was acceptance of American power as a potential force for good. The recriminations of Zionist ideologues in DSOC notwithstanding, a romance for the Jewish old left as directed into Zionist channels typified new left survivors in DSOC and NAM. This could lead to exaggerated notions in American historical memory of just how largely Jewish the American left was. Like the Socialist Party of the 1920s and late 1930s onward (as well as the Communist Party after 1945), Jews dominated the diminished left of the 1970s as they had not in the 1960s. As Judah Drob, the memoirist of the 1930s YPSL, mused, this was “due more to their stiff-neckedness, remarked already in biblical times.”39
Yet the consequences of this abiding fealty to Israel were profound and far-reaching. An unshakable commitment to American military aid to Israel precluded DSOC from ever making a serious critique of the military-industrial complex. This not only severely constrained any critique of American foreign policy; it also meant that this entire generation of progressives would not offer any kind of coherent opposition to the deindustrialization of America, which, for all of the political forces arrayed against the labor movement, was the single largest factor in the decline of trade unionism in the late twentieth century. Israel was certainly not the sole cause of this development—increasingly prominent feminist and gay liberationist concerns were also major contributors to shaping the character of post–Cold War liberalism to the neglect of the traditional concerns of the American left and labor movement. But these three shibboleths proved the irresistible combination leading to the most important feature of post–Cold War liberalism: assent to the “global war” against “Islamofascism.” Especially when seen in light of his frankly elitist valorization of the “new class” as a force for global uplift, this may yet prove to have been the most enduring legacy of Michael Harrington.
The presidential campaign of Ted Kennedy in 1980 proved to gravely disappoint the high expectations held for nearly a decade. Kennedy badly stumbled in the first weeks of the campaign, often unable to articulate a reason for running other than the family name.40 He won a handful of primaries, most notably an upset in New York largely on the strength of dissatisfaction with Carter’s real and imagined slights toward Israel. Many DSOC members ran as delegate candidates for Kennedy, including Harrington himself among several in New York.41 But once it was clear Carter would be renominated, a greatly dejected Harrington remained aloof from the general election, his hopes of a return to the center of American political power once and for all ended. So great was Harrington’s ambivalence that he even put in a kind word for the third-party candidacy of Barry Commoner. Still flush with past euphoria, Harrington insisted, “If Carter wins, he will be a lame duck President in 1982. . . . If Carter loses, the internal structure of the Democratic Party will be wide open.”42
The interlude between the election and inauguration of Ronald Reagan was marked by a peculiar final tribute to the lofty aspirations that characterized DSOC’s most hopeful days. In December 1980, a conference was held in Washington, DC, attended by several European leaders in the Socialist International. Willy Brandt, the former West German chancellor, was the unrivaled force behind making the Socialist International an active and relevant organization as its member parties increasingly formed governments in Western Europe, and he fought for the admission of DSOC into the International over the vehement objection of Social Democrats USA. As parties of the third world were increasingly recruited into the International, many of highly dubious democratic credentials, Harrington served an indispensable role in Brandt’s ambitions. Not being burdened with high office, Harrington was entrusted to do most of the International’s busy work, namely the drafting of resolutions, programs, and manifestos.43 Guided by the vision of Brandt and Harrington, the Socialist International played a significant and positive role in the extension of democracy to many parts of the world, particularly Latin America, but foundered into irrelevance after the fall of Communism.
Harrington, Ron Dellums, and William Winpisinger were the featured American speakers at the conference, with the more impressive European participants including Brandt, Francois Mitterand just a few months before his election as president of France; Tony Benn, the titular leader of the left wing of the British Labour Party; and Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme.44 From his perch at the AFL-CIO, Tom Kahn attempted to sabotage the conference and attacked it as a front for the Euro-Communist movement.45 Indeed, Brandt may well have conceived the conference as his way of sending a message to SDUSA and its allies in the American foreign policy establishment that the Socialist International was determined to pursue its own independent policies. The formal sponsor of the conference was the Institute for Democratic Socialism, set up by DSOC and run by Nancy Lieber, who with her husband Robert, a Georgetown University professor, were typical of the aspiring Washington policy makers who saw DSOC as useful to advancing their careers in the 1970s. But all that had changed with the election of Ronald Reagan, with Robert Lieber becoming an outspoken neocon hawk.
The merger of DSOC and NAM was formally agreed to in the spring of 1981, with a unity convention scheduled for the following year. Ben Ross, who devotedly ran the Committee Against the NAM Merger, lamented in a circular to the delegates at that 1981 convention, “Our national office has seen fit, at a time of devastating budget cuts and rising right-wing reaction, to give priority to the NAM issue.”46 But more than anything, this plea reflected the crashing of illusions about DSOC. Harrington’s commitment to the Democratic Party and organized liberalism was mostly the means to his personal ambitions; a more principled and long-view grounded approach to working within the Democratic Party would likely have alienated Harrington’s early YPSL followers much sooner. In short, the collapse of the Kennedy campaign and the closely related NAM merger represented the passing of an illusion—that Democratic Party liberalism and historic American Socialism could be made one and the same, and on the former’s terms.
The unity convention of DSOC and NAM was held March 20–21, 1982, in Detroit, with the new organization named Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). John Judis, in his report on the convention for In These Times, optimistically compared it to the 1901 convention that formed the Socialist Party.47 Mike Harrington remained national chairman, with new national board members from NAM including feminist authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Roberta Lynch, black historian Manning Marable, and Richard Healey. Among the DSOC holdovers on the board were Irving Howe; William Winpisinger; Santa Cruz, California mayor Mike Rotkin; and Harry Britt, a gay member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.48 In a sign that the early prediction of Ron Radosh of where DSOC was ultimately headed was being fulfilled, the keynote symposium was led by George Crockett, a black congressman from Detroit who openly allied with the Communist Party.49
In These Times editorialized, “The hope of the DSOC-NAM merger is in renewed focus on elections.”50 Yet DSA took the very opposite tack. In the years just after the merger, almost all of its energies were devoted to organizing around opposition to American intervention in Central America. In a curious twist, the war in Nicaragua prompted Ron Radosh, who made the first scouting mission ahead of the wave of new left refugees into DSOC, to renounce the left altogether.51 With a startlingly large cohort of long-time comrades, Radosh would eventually inhabit the most fanatical quarters of the post–Cold War right, becoming their expert on the American left in elaborating the hidden “radical” and “socialist” agenda of Barack Obama. Yet ironically, this return of focus to opposing American foreign policy only accelerated the drift away from the fundamentals of new left radicalism. The libertarian author Murray Rothbard, who in years past had frequently collaborated with the scholars at Studies on the Left, lamented that “the left argued vehemently for continuing economic aid to the leftist regime in Nicaragua,” decrying DSA as “the new Browderism,” committed to “egalitarian welfare imperialism in behalf of third world governments . . . shades of Henry Wallace and the liberal imperialism of the 1940s!”52
Despite the nominal antiwar posture of the left regarding Central America, the transition to the foreign policy of Clinton-era liberalism was well underway. But the problem for DSA was far more fundamental than the particulars of the war in Nicaragua. As Ben Ross wrote in an open letter after the furor over the NAM merger subsided,
If we are simply advocates for the different agendas of all the single issue groups, without a distinctive point of view of our own, this problem will only get worse. DSA may turn into a Baskin-Robbins of the left, with a flavor for every taste and a special-of-the-month in response to each new fad. If this is what we are to become, why indeed should anyone make DSA their priority instead of concentrating on whatever single issue is closest to their heart? We need to re-emphasize what makes us distinctive as democratic socialists: our understanding that inequalities of economic power are at the root of oppression in our society, and that a majority coalition organized around economic issues is needed to overcome those inequalities.53
Indeed, the assets that led to such hope for DSOC in the 1970s vanished almost in an instant after the merger. The major blow came with the discontinuation of the Democratic midterm convention after 1982, causing Democratic Agenda to be quietly liquidated by the end of that year.54 The aging labor leaders whose generous funding, given largely out of nostalgia for their own Socialist youths, had made Democratic Agenda and its wide influence possible were rapidly passing from the scene. Both extremes from the earlier DSOC and NAM were also not long to fade away. Alex Spinrad relocated to Israel and once stood as a parliamentary candidate for the left-wing Meretz Party, and Ben Ross published a newsletter, Socialist Standard, providing a voice for the right wing of DSA for a few more years. Richard Healey resigned from the national board within a few years out of frustration with the limits of DSA support for the Sandinistas.55
The 1984 election made clear that American politics was passing DSA by. Much of the left was aroused to excitement by the Democratic primary candidacy of Jesse Jackson that year and again in 1988. Jackson unsuccessfully appealed to Mike Harrington for an endorsement and even asked him to write speeches for him.56 Jackson’s own Rainbow Coalition was not only overshadowing DSA as the major force in the left wing of the Democratic Party but also showing greater commitment to a long-term struggle inside the Democratic Party than DSOC ever had. Socialist Standard showed its fighting spirit behind Walter Mondale as the candidate of the labor movement against “New Democrat” Gary Hart, with a frequent contributor being none other than Ernest Erber, the 1930s YPSL chairman who led the momentous Trotskyist exodus of 1937.57 But in the words of Michael Harrington, “The Mondale campaign united all of the class and social forces we had deemed essential, and went down to ignominious defeat.”58
The last hurrah of DSA as a serious force in the Democratic Party was a “New Directions Conference” in Washington, held the first weekend of May 1986. Harrington, Jesse Jackson, and Barbara Ehrenreich were the conveners, with other keynoters including Gloria Steinem, Communication Workers president Morton Bahr, and ADA executive director Ann Lewis.59 The conference explicitly targeted growing voices of “centrism” in the Democratic Party such as the Democratic Leadership Council. Ann Lewis was particularly outspoken, arguing, “In their rush to the right, or the center, or wherever they think the political terrain is safest, these modern day neo-Democrats deceive themselves.”60 But Lewis was almost perfectly representative of the generation of movement liberal operatives in the orbit of DSOC and DSA, going on to serve in Bill Clinton’s White House and then as a top advisor to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008. In no small irony, for all the heated rhetoric about the “socialism” of Barack Obama, most aging veterans of the heyday of DSOC, including Gloria Steinem and Barney Frank, were committed supporters of Hillary Clinton in 2008.
But the bottom line was that DSA was Michael Harrington, and once Harrington passed from the scene, the organization would be reduced to a shell. Harrington’s celebrity from writing The Other America wore thin by the 1980s, and his long succession of books on socialist theory and history received scant attention even from his own followers. Interestingly, Harrington’s books exhibited a thoughtfulness sorely lacking in his political activism, containing surprising overlap with both anarchist and Catholic social thought. As Gary Dorrien wrote a decade after Harrington’s death, his concept of socialism “had almost nothing to do with economic nationalization and everything to do with economic democracy.”61 But Harrington was himself largely responsible for this disconnect. With a stunning lack of self-reflection, he confessed his greatest fear was to be seen like Norman Thomas as “a socialist who threatened no one and nothing.”62 This was a clear case of projection for a man who spent nearly a decade husbanding the image of a safe socialist to the Ted Kennedy administration-in-waiting on to a man of God who put everything on the line for his principles.
Harrington was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1985. After successful early treatment, in late 1987 the cancer returned and he was given one or two years to live. The following summer, a gala testimonial dinner was held on his sixtieth birthday. Paying tribute to Harrington that night were Gloria Steinem, Cesar Chavez, William Winpisinger, and Ted Kennedy, who placed Harrington squarely within the myth of his brothers: “In our lifetime, it is Mike Harrington who has come the closest to fulfilling the vision of America that my brother Robert Kennedy had, when he said ‘some men see things as they are and ask why, but I dream things that never were and say why not.’ Some call it socialism, I call it the Sermon on the Mount.”63 Michael Harrington died on July 31, 1989, in the home he shared with his wife and two sons in Larchmont, New York. His biographer Maurice Isserman expressed the conceit of his admirers: “In the years since Michael’s death, no claimant has emerged to pick up the mantle of Debs and Thomas and Harrington.”64
A more revealing comparison, however, could be made between Harrington and William Z. Foster. Like Harrington, Foster entered national prominence occupying the left-most edge of the clique of ideologues surrounding the top leadership of the American labor movement. Both played a destructive role at a critical moment of radical upsurge in America—Harrington’s Port Huron antics might well be compared to Foster’s shadowy role in the Farmer-Labor Party movement of the 1920s both before and after becoming a Communist. In vastly different contexts and circumstances to be sure, both men took a sharp left turn in a desperate move to recapture the perceived moment of glory they squandered, and when finally, after interminable slights, they reached the summit of leadership of their respective movements, all that was left was to preside over its effective dissolution. Additionally for Harrington, he remained the creature of a very different movement from what most who joined believed they were supporting. Very few in DSOC or DSA had any understanding of it, but the key to Harrington’s politics was that he was, and to the very end remained, a Shachtmanite.
Yet ideology was not the key to understanding Mike Harrington. Even as he continued to promote in full sincerity the original vision of “realignment,” his entire political posture was based on a contradiction. Harrington consistently sought both entrée to the liberal establishment and thereby to national power, and at the same time to be seen as the credible leader of a radical movement. Both poles kept Harrington from ever wandering too far toward the opposite shore, but this stance was still untenable so long as it demanded he be all things to all people left of center. Like Charles Foster Kane, he entered politics out of the desire to be loved, and his downfall was that he demanded that love on his own terms. However dubious the claim of Harrington to the succession of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, it was taken seriously enough that it carried a burden of responsibility. When he staked this entire noble heritage on the presidential prospects of Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Michael Harrington ensured that not even the memory of historic American Socialism would have a meaningful place in the politics of the post–Cold War era.
DSA remained a formidable local presence in a few cities into the 1990s, most notably Chicago, largely due to the labors and legacy of Carl Shier, the veteran Shachtmanite going back to the 1940s among the founders of DSOC. Among those who sought and received the endorsement of Chicago DSA in his first attempts at political office in these years was a recent Harvard Law graduate named Barack Obama.65 Throughout the 1990s, DSA persisted as something akin on the left to the debating societies that once set much of the intellectual tone for the conservative movement, with a highly impressive list of names on a letterhead and very little besides. Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornell West were the best known popular left-wing authors of the 1990s to lend their names to DSA, with such labor leaders lingering on the scene as William Winpisinger and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers. During the “centrist” presidency of Bill Clinton, the new craze of the left wing of the Democratic Party was the creation of an explicit “party within a party” such as the New Party, launched by the vintage new left “community organizing” outfit ACORN, or the Labor Party, the creation of the most militantly left-wing unions then on the scene.66 But with the exception proving the rule in Chicago, DSA had no serious influence on these movements.
It was within the labor movement itself that the legacy of DSA, and the larger change in the character of the democratic left that led up to the merger creating it, was most conspicuously felt. An insurgency emerged against the leadership of Lane Kirkland in the AFL-CIO after shocking defeats for the labor movement in the early Clinton years; the leader who ultimately took charge of this insurgency, Service Employees (SEIU) president John Sweeney, had long been an ally of Kirkland’s leadership and even nominally associated with Social Democrats USA. But all that was necessary for Sweeney to have the left wing of the labor movement in his pocket was to take out a token membership in DSA. Though this nominal membership in DSA was largely forgotten after he ascended to the AFL-CIO presidency, Sweeney sent greetings to its conferences throughout his tenure.67 Among the new left academics whose rise was the subject of Theodore Draper’s withering attack in the New York Review of Books, a cottage industry emerged to celebrate the new “social movement unionism” and its toppling of the succession from Samuel Gompers that dominated the labor movement for more than a century.
But in practice, this “social movement unionism” merely amounted to accommodation with the drift of the Democratic Party away from traditional trade union concerns, largely at the altar of identity politics. In many ways, the DSOC bloc of the 1970s had prevailed in the AFL-CIO, but was extremely ill suited to the challenges of the post–Cold War era. The fundamental crisis that has faced the American labor movement for the last generation, and has scarcely ever been acknowledged, is the simple fact that after the Cold War, it outlived its usefulness to the state. The only answer given to this development by the labor movement has been a doubling down on its marriage to the Democratic Party. This became evident in 2005, when Sweeney’s successor at the SEIU, Andy Stern, led an opposition bloc against Sweeney that included the Teamsters, Carpenters, United Food and Commercial Workers, Hotel and Restaurant Employees, and the remnant of the old garment unions, ultimately bolting from the AFL-CIO.
The new old guard of the AFL-CIO, based in the public sector unions and such old-line industrial unions as the UAW and Machinists, had unmistakable roots in the old DSOC bloc. So, too, did the narrative of the split repeated by virtually the entire self-identified left—far left cynicism accompanied by a vehement insistence that this could not possibly be compared to the founding of the CIO, a genuine “people’s movement.” But the depressing truth was that it was exactly like the founding of the CIO. The dissenting unions, many wanting by good progressive standards, made impressive organizing gains in a transforming economy while the national labor leadership remained stagnant and in both cases, in large measure, with the self-interested cooperation of captains of industry. Andy Stern proved highly analogous to John L. Lewis, a brilliant and effective but reckless operator who blew his tremendous opportunity in the space of just a few years. Only the circumstances of the wartime economy in the 1940s make the CIO seem such a spectacularly greater success in retrospect. That no other narrative than “people’s movement” myopia was even conceivable to all but a few, amounting to nothing less than an assault on the historical memory of American Socialism, may be the most enduring legacy of DSA and its two predecessors.
By the time of the 2005 split in the labor movement, however, DSA was no longer even the glorified debating society it could make the appearance of being in the 1990s. Only one labor movement supporter of any importance, Eliseo Medina of the SEIU, remained. The national board has been reduced to a cohort of aging cadre from the 1970s. Still, a national convention in Los Angeles in 2008 managed to attract more than one hundred voting delegates, and a crowd of four hundred gathered for a keynote address by Congresswoman Hilda Solis, soon to become Barack Obama’s secretary of labor.68 Some organizational vitality has remained by virtue of the DSA youth arm, Young Democratic Socialists (YDS), which has consistently been able to boast campus chapters in the several dozens. Much of their appeal has rested in being formally affiliated with the International Union of Socialist Youth, with such fraternal relations as the youth wing of the African National Congress.
The most memorable impact of YDS on the post-Cold War radical scene undoubtedly stemmed from its participation in the unlikely revival of Students for a Democratic Society in 2006.69 Two high school students who frequented antiwar protests had the idea to revive SDS and before long elicited a groundswell response.70 But the group was increasingly influenced by a group of aging SDS originals who called themselves the “Movement for a Democratic Society,” described by Maurice Isserman in a letter to The Nation as “a cohort of radical elders enamored of the worst moment in the original SDS’s history.”71 Indeed, quite like DSOC and DSA, the new SDS was only a touchstone of nostalgia for a historic radical organization, as defined by its dubious claimant at the time of its demise, who was in great measure responsible for it. Still, it would be difficult to overstate the irony that this should be the fate of the organization founded by Michael Harrington, nearly as great as that of the journey from the St. Louis Platform to the Coalition for a Democratic Majority.