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quietly let my membership lapse in Democratic Socialists of Amer–
ica, for reasons that will become clear in this essay.)
Harrington's problem is that he has reached the point in
political life he has long feared. He himself complains that he runs
the risk of being seen as "the charming representative of an idea
whose time had long since gone," or like his friend Norman Thomas,
someone who has been turned into "a kind of Leftist icon by estab–
lished power . . . a socialist who threatened no one and nothing . . .
who could be revered on ceremonial occasions and cited to prove
that the country was genuinely democratic." Ironically, even those
who value his fight for meaningful reforms, like Senator Edward
Kennedy, honored him by saying that while some called Harring–
ton's politics socialism, he preferred to call it the "Sermon on the
Mount." In his book, Harrington takes off after a conservative
senator who attacked his plea for a new fight against poverty by red–
baiting him. But one must question whether the kind of praise given
him by his supporters is useful, since the essence of their praise is
that Harrington has worked for liberal reform on the basis of
religious moralism and that his socialism is hardly relevant.
This has certainly not been Harrington's intent. To put his
politics into perspective, one has to go the famous debate between
Reinhold Niebuhr and Norman Thomas in the thirties and forties.
Thomas, insisting on the possibility of "socialism in our time,"
eschewed those former comrades who had deserted his Party's ranks
for the Democrats, and who voted consistently for Roosevelt and
supported the New Deal. To them, Niebuhr argued that politics was
"the act of choosing among possible alternatives," and hence he in–
sisted that those favoring fundamental change had to work within
the Democratic Party to help move it in a progressive direction.
What Harrington did was to combine Thomas's leftist stance
with Niebuhr's political strategy, pushing a leftist agenda
within
the
ranks of the Democratic Party, a form of Browderism without the
Comintern. Harrington has consistently given his support to the
chosen candidate of the Democratic Party as the lesser evil, even
while his own program or candidate was defeated, as when that can–
didate was Hubert Humphrey in 1968 or Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Seeking a "progressive majority coalition" for the seventies and
eighties, Harrington defined his goal as trying to unite three diverse
constituencies: middle-class antiwar forces that had supported the
McGovern campaign; blue-collar workers led by what he calls the
