DSA
Michael Harrington is Spinning in His Grave
Harrington speaking at a Socialist International Congress in Vancouver, 1978 – Public Domain
Most of you will not know who Michael Harrington was. Or why he should be spinning. Let me explain.
He was the founder of the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982 and its leader until he died in 1989. But any comparison between the DSA he created and what is now getting headlines for shaking up the Democratic Party is tenuous at best, and the difference between what he championed and what this younger cohort of amateurs puts forth is a great chasm whose winds are doing the graveyard gyrations.
I knew Mike. He was a close friend and traveling companion; he married one of my college colleagues, and for ten years I watched him up close as he tried to make socialism a part of the American political system.
The essential element of Mike’s politics in the 1960’s and ‘70’s was anti-Communism, and no one would have thought for a moment to call the Democratic Socialists “Communists,” as Trump has taken to doing. The whole socialist tradition in America was to shun the Communist experience in the Soviet Union, denounce Stalinism, and put forth a vision of a democratically elected government that would be like those of the Scandinavian countries, providing state services in health, education, housing and the like while preserving some capitalist enterprises to provide the taxes to pay for it all.
That was why Mike founded the DSA in 1982 and was its National Cochairman, and chief spokesman, until his death in 1989. Nowhere stuff about ending capitalism, doing away with the Presidency and the Supreme Court, gouging billionaires, everything-free-and-not-having-to-work, not even state-run groceries. The 
original Democratic Socialists strove, as Mike once put it, “to be on the left wing of the possible,” and that generally meant working within the Democratic Party. Where indeed Mike had some influence, particularly in the 1960’s when his book on the poor in the U.S., The Other America, influenced the Democrats’ emerging War on Poverty.
That DSA was never a large organization, having maybe 6,000 members in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. What changed was the Presidential campaign of 2016, when Bernie Sanders, a leading DSA figure and its only representative in Congress, began having great success in attracting young voters new to the idea of socialism and making of it pretty much whatever they wanted government to do for them. The DSA has grown to some 120,000 members today and looks to have a real influence in this fall’s elections.
But it is no longer anything that could be called democratic or socialist, and it has stood on its head the principles that Mike and his colleagues stood for.
It refused to support Kamala Harris in the last election; the DSA under Mike actively supported George McGovern in the 1972 election because he feared a Nixon presidency.
It issued a weak disapproval of Hamas for its 2023 massacres; Mike was an outspoken champion of the new Israel.
It has become outspokenly anti-Western in policy with Sanders; the original DSA was part of the Socialist International with social democratic parties in Germany, Sweden, France, and England.
Its leaders have vowed to do away with capitalism; the original DSA knew that capitalism was the economic engine that created the economy but that it needed to be supplemented with a welfare state on the Nordic model.
I don’t think these new DSAers can possibly have any serious influence in the months ahead. They will win a few mayoralties around and some seats in Congress this fall, and their little bloc in the House will keep causing trouble for the Democratic leadership. But their politics is so far from mainstream America that they will soon not even interest the suppliant media, and talk of socialism will go back into the backrooms where it has always lurked.
But poor Mike. Spinning. Not that DSA.
Red All Over? It’s Not So Black and White
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
In the month celebrating 250 years of red, white and blue, Americans were seeing plenty of red — and not just as part of commemorative trifectas or midterm forecast maps.
Red-baiters based in red states (or the financial districts of blue ones) have a wave of actual reds in power to push against. Once, the best opposition they could hope for were such fellow travelers as Reds director Warren Beatty, who as biographer Peter Biskind notes “was no Communist but empathized with the idealism of the American left” (and whose production “reflects his ambivalence”).
In 2026 they are able to point to candidates who can win elections (if only within the bluest of blue electorates) affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America collective, which dropped a manifesto in mid-July proclaiming a need for “aggressive wealth taxes” to bring about the day when the whole sectors of “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses.”
On August 3 alone, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page offered “A Brief History of Wealth Creation” from John Steele Gordon, chiding “many on the left, unable to distinguish between wealth aggregation and wealth creation,” immediately above Allysia Finley judging “the socialist agenda” to be “a sham” (and not just because it attracts “relatively affluent people” who “dress like hobos”).
In July’s Journal, Karl Rove called for not falling for “a seductive tale” reducing life’s woes to the machinations of “nasty villains with evil plans” who “can be beaten” by ballots for ruthless representatives (like the narrative he helped provide for George W. Bush?), while Obama staffer Rahm Emanuel deemed efforts by “socialists who led the charge to defund the police, open the borders, abolish prisons, release violent criminals onto the streets and degrade the flag” to be just as counterproductive as their efforts “to turn safe Democratic states and districts a darker shade of blue” at the expense of winning purple areas. (In fairness, the socialists might spare the Stars and Stripes.)
Even former card-carriers Joshua Muravchik and Ronald Radosh took their ex-comrades to task in 2025. Those who “would transform the economy from private enterprise to public ownership, but — unlike communists — only through persuasion and legislation, not violence and coercion,” a viewpoint for which they take pains to note they had both been true believers, “must choose between democracy and socialism” when the former cannot yield enough consensus for the latter. Thus, “the two of us made peace with democratic capitalism” while “the DSA has clearly made the reverse choice.”
There’s something to be said for socialists being forthright about their most radical ideas. In contrast, as Roderick Long observes, free-market libertarians have perennially treated theirs as “esoteric doctrine … confined to scholarly studies and movement periodicals.” In a previous era, the sort of rhetoric in the DSA program would have only been shown to the general public accompanied by a South Park-style disclaimer on how “this is what socialists actually believe.”
Yet the DSA’s vision of how “the political and economic system under which we live is built on private ownership and profit at all costs” leaves out many of the same complications absent from Gordon’s “brief history.” Half a century before Radosh made that “peace with democratic capitalism,” he filled a book with the help of a very different coauthor, “firm believer in laissez-faire capitalism” Murray Rothbard. In A New History of Leviathan, Radosh and Rothbard’s joint introduction explained how they and a contributing roster of leftist and libertarian historians traced how the “economy dominated by giant multinational corporations” in the years leading up to the bicentennial had followed, not from “fierce winds of competition,” but from efforts in which “sophisticated reformers sought to stifle” just such remnants of “a freely competitive economy” — preferring instead to “mold the government into a mighty instrument of monopolization and cartelization.”
Getting the dust off the shelf of books by A New History of Leviathan’s generation of New Left historians, and carrying their analysis forward, will show how much both economic innovation and well-being for the masses are being held back by the assumption that current concentrations of wealth are the result of an inherent conflict between the two, and not by a distorted conception of both.
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