It is not surprising the NY Times decided to cite one of my main avatars, Michael Harrington, in a way that puts a negative spotlight on the young people who have joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and are making in-roads in the Democratic Party. Maurice Isserman tries to avoid that, but the tone is fairly clear. What is ironic is Isserman was, in the early to mid 1980s, considered the "enfant terrible" for his pro-Communist Party member analysis of the Old Left, meaning he looked to the individuals and whether they were really spies, and if so, to what extent. He greatly upset the great historian, Theodore Draper, who wrote what many considered the definitive history of the American Communist Party, with the way Isserman expressed his own youthful enthusiasm (Isserman behaved in a manner many fellow historians thought was unbecoming of a scholar).* When Isserman decided to write Harrington's biography, there were grumblings among the Dissent magazine set, including some of the founders of the magazine who were still alive at the time. Harrington had, in the 1960s and 1970s, at least, remained the main non-Jew among the lapsed Jews at the magazine--fitting as Harrington called himself a lapsed Catholic, and Isserman had been part of a New Left that castigated Harrington and Dissent for their failure to make opposition to the War Against Vietnam the top priority for the American Left overall.
I found Isserman's ensuing Harrington biography disappointing because he never really grappled with Harrington's work, and I think Harrington would have found the focus on Harrington's personal life to be a largely trivial exercise. Harrington gets to argue with Ralph Nader near the end of my RFK-lives novel in what I consider the ultimate left v. left battle that could have occurred in a world where RFK had survived and became president. My novel is also dedicated in part to Michael Harrington. As someone who has read every book Harrington wrote, I think there still remains a book to be written about Harrington's political economy philosophy and policies. Too bad I don't get to live in the timeline where I am a history or literature professor to write it.
But in the end, the NY Times has added a wrinkle to I.F. Stone's famous line, You can always tell a conservative by the way they quote dead liberals--Stone's point being there are usually no intellectual right wingers to admire once one gets past Edmund Burke. Anyway, the Times' wrinkle is they now want readers to like a more tame Michael Harrington, and use that timid version of Harrington to criticize the young today. Harrington and the also late I.F. Stone (both men died in 1989) understood what Stone articulated in his May 19, 1969 essay In Defense of the Campus Rebels, which may be found online here, and in Stone's essay compilation, "Polemics and Prophecies, 1967-1970." In the essay, Stone criticized himself for being too focused on showing the lies of the Johnson administration and then new Nixon administration, to the exclusion of black poverty, general poverty, and the rights of students to question society. Stone then wrote:
"This is what the campus rebels are trying to tell us, in the only way which seems to get attention. I do not like much of what they are saying or doing. I do not like to hear opponent shouted down, much less beaten up. I do not like to hear any one group or class, including policemen, called pigs. I do not think four-letter words are arguments. I hate, hate, insolence and violence. I see the as man's most ancient and enduring enemies and I hate to see them welling up on my side. But I feel about the rebels as Erasmus did about Luther. Erasmus helped inspire the Reformation but was repelled by the man who brought it to fruition. He saw that Luther was as intolerant and as dogmatic as the Church. "From argument," as Erasmus saga it, "there would be a quick resort to the sword, and the whole world would be full of fury and madness." Two centuries of religious wars without parallel for blood-lust were so to prove how right were his misgivings. But while Erasmus would dare not join Luther, he dared not oppose him, lest haply, as he confessed 'he might be fighting against the spirit of God. (Here Stone gave us a footnote, citing Froude's Life and Letters of Erasmus). I feel that the New Left and the black revolutionaries, like Luther, are doing God's work, too, in refusing to no longer submit to evil, and challenging society to reform or crush them." (Parenthesis and emphasis added)**
This is precisely what I loved about Stone, and Harrington learned this as well by the late 1960s. Stone always understood youthful exuberance and idealism, which is why Stone supported the Popular Front with the Communists and Communist Party in the 1930s in order to promote FDR's New Deal, and push the New Deal to its limits. Stone has been libeled as a Communist agent, which if you read the Wiki page in the section regarding espionage charges, I was the one who cited to the Robert Cottrell biography to attack that libel. Harrington was always clear he was a democratic socialist, and was too young at the time of the early Cold War Red Scares, and never had to face what Stone and others did in the 1930s and 1940s. Harrington's collegial relationship with William F. Buckley did not hurt, either. Harrington was always Buckley's favorite atheist and favorite socialist, more for Harrington's humble humanitarian sensibilities and Harrington's Catholic-inspired worldview than anything else. Years after Harrington's death from cancer, Buckley gave the ultimate compliment to Harrington, proving the Stone adage. Buckley told Corey Robin, who has written extensively about political philosophy, that if he, Buckley, was a college student in the new millennium, his hero would be Michael Harrington and maybe even become a Communist (what Buckley implied is it would not be Edmund Burke or Russell Kirk). Buckley, in his old age, had reached a point where he had begun to see the need for Harrington's humanitarian sensibilities, and Communism's original humanitarian sensibilities, as the right wing he cultivated had dissolved even then into madness and corruption. This is not too surprising, as I recall Vidal recounting a conversation he had with British socialist Michel Foot, where both admitted to each other that they found solace in their old age reading Montaigne's essays.
My take then on the young DSAers is they should keep agitating, keep mounting primary challenges to Democrats, and keep pushing the Overton Window regarding American politics about what is and should be "possible." They will show who the true "moderates" are, which are liberals, particularly left-liberals, something many Americans used to believe in the 1930s through 1970s, where a President Eisenhower, as a Republican, could say he was for labor union promotion, 90% marginal top income tax rates, etc. And if the DSAers want to shout down Trump administration officials in restaurants, I admit I stand with Stone and Harrington against that type of behavoir, but I am not going to de-legitimize them, or say they are not welcome or somehow destructive of our common goals. If any generation is destroying our society and the planet, it is ours, and our parents' generation especially. We should be far more humble in relationship to our children, and should be apologizing to them for our destructive behaviors and the political leaders we continue to choose. Our children are the species' future, and they will make mistakes along the way, but their enthusiasm and their demand to make a better future are what count more than anything else. I will therefore continue to stand with them and support their enthusiasm and demands, even when they go beyond my own.
* My own take on Draper's magisterial "biography" of the American Communist Party is Draper overstated "fealty to the Soviet Union" as a defining characteristic of American Communist Party members--though not overstated as much as the young Isserman believed. My take is people in the 1920s and 1930s became Communists often as labor union radicals or as persons deeply devoted to standing up for African-Americans and fighting racism and sexism in our society. Those motivations led them to compromises on "party lines," but these party line shifts did not define these people as either individuals or what continued to motivate their overall politics and activism. That these folks were often tiresome to deal with, and were frustrating when refusing to recognize victories being achieved, and the party lines were cynical and sometimes outright disgusting is something I think anti-Cold War historians like Ellen Schreker and Maurice Isserman initially downplayed. I remain, however, a devoted fan of the late Mr. Draper, as his other books and essays over the years are brilliantly researched and written. Just for examples, Draper's book of essays, A Present of Things Past, and his insightful understanding of the Reagan Iran and Contra scandals (A Very Thin Line) are paradigm shifting reads.
** Stone, in 1970, also wrote an essay entitled Only the Bums Can Save the Country Now, using Nixon's line about campus radical "bums" to say that Nixon's move into Cambodia, after having led people to believe he would pursue peace in Vietnam, was a betrayal of monumental proportions. See the essay at page 292 here.
** Stone, in 1970, also wrote an essay entitled Only the Bums Can Save the Country Now, using Nixon's line about campus radical "bums" to say that Nixon's move into Cambodia, after having led people to believe he would pursue peace in Vietnam, was a betrayal of monumental proportions. See the essay at page 292 here.
