AI Summary
5 min readIn November 2015, hundreds of students stood in the rain at Georgetown University, hoping to hear a presidential candidate named Bernie Sanders. When he finally spoke, he summed up his vision with two words that most Americans had never heard applied to politics: "Democratic socialism." At the time, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had only 6,000 members, with an average age over 60. Sanders himself was not a member. But people Googled the term, started joining, and after Donald Trump won in 2016, membership surged. The DSA now tops 120,000 members, making it the largest socialist organization in American history. This episode of Throughline traces the story of the man who built the intellectual and organizational foundation for that moment—Michael Harrington—and the question that haunted him: Is compromise necessary to change the world, or does it limit what the world can be?
From Catholic Devotion to Socialist Awakening
Michael Harrington grew up in a devout Irish Catholic family in St. Louis. His mother hoped he would become a priest. The moral compass of his youth was Rerum Novarum, a 1890s papal doctrine that called attention to the struggles of the working class. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a hero in his home; one relative insisted on being carried to a ballot box on his deathbed to vote for FDR one last time.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction and the Modern DSA** - The episode opens with the 2015 Georgetown speech where Bernie Sanders popularized the term "democratic socialism," leading to a surge in interest and membership for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
- 2 (07:07) **Part One: Rerum Novarum and Revolutionary Change** - The episode traces Harrington's early life in a devout Irish Catholic family, where his moral compass was shaped by a 1890s papal doctrine called *Rerum Novarum*, which advocated for the working class and critiqued capitalism's excesses.
- 3 (14:17) **From Catholic Worker to Socialist** - After leaving the Catholic Worker, Harrington, now 24, was untethered and drawn to the literature of Marx and Lenin, eventually meeting Max Shachtman, a leader in the socialist scene who advocated for "democratic socialism"—a philosophy that was anti-authoritarian, anti-communist, and pro-economic equality.
- 4 (19:08) **Part Two: The Man Who Discovered Poverty** - The episode moves to 1960, where Harrington, now a civil rights activist, protested outside the Democratic National Convention alongside Martin Luther King Jr., having grown disillusioned with his earlier romanticized views of the Confederacy.
- 5 (25:24) **The Book That Changed a Presidency** - After a glowing 13,000-word review in *The New Yorker*, *The Other America* became a bestseller, and Harrington was hailed as "the man who discovered poverty," becoming a sought-after speaker on college campuses.
- 6 (30:24) **A Moment of Influence and the First Compromise** - Harrington became an unofficial spokesperson for the White House, even appearing as the first guest on William F. Buckley's *Firing Line*, while his concept of "the other America" influenced Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches.
- 7 (35:50) **Part Three: The Left Wing of the Possible** - By 1968, with the anti-war movement exploding and students backing Eugene McCarthy, Harrington made a controversial choice: he supported the pro-war candidate, Hubert Humphrey, believing him to be the "lesser of two evils" who could beat Richard Nixon.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
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.
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