CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

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........

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