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- [00:00]
A
Hi, listeners, it's me, it's Eli. I am asking you at the top of the show to please rate us well on Spotify and Apple and YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. Tell your friends, write a nice review. We really want to get the word out on breaking History because we here at the Free Press, myself, Poppy Damon, my senior producer, Adam Feldman, Jonathan Rosenberg, we work very hard on putting these little documentaries together, and we just think that more people would like to know about it. And the more people that listen, the more resources we will have to continue to make great podcasts. Now, coming up next, we dive into the likely next mayor of New York City, Zoran Mamdani. And we look at the man who founded his party, the Democratic Socialists of America. It is a gripping tale and in some ways a warning about what happens when you try to open your big tent to radicals and illiberal revolutionaries.
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Irving Berlin. What happened once happens again when news appears a mystery.
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A
Hi, listeners. I want to tell you about the Free Press's latest new podcast, Old School with Shiloh Brooks. When we met Shiloh, he was one of the most popular professors and he was making reading great books cool again. Now he's hosting his show to help all of us, and young men in particular, get back into reading for pleasure. The show features intimate conversations with fascinating men, from fitness gurus to philosophers about the books that shape their lives. They cover books like the Old man and the Sea, Middlemarch, and Down and out in Paris and London to bring you a truly old school education. New episodes out every Thursday. So subscribe to Old School with Shiloh Brooks on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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C
From corrupt politicians and the billionaires that fund them. Let our words ring out so loud tonight that Andrew Cuomo can hear them in his $8,000 a month apartment.
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A
So it looks like the next mayor of the greatest city in the world is going to be this guy.
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C
The corporate greed that we're seeing in this country, it cannot be separated from the level of inequality that people are living through.
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A
A Zoran Mandani victory will mean many things if he pulls it off. A clear signal that the New York and possibly national Democratic Party has lurched further to the left than it ever has before. A potential for an even more intrusive welfare state for our country's largest city. But first and foremost, Mayor Zoran Mamdani would be a triumph for American socialism. He's attacking you as a communist, are you?
- [03:16]
C
No, I'm a Democratic socialist. That means I believe in dignity for all people.
- [03:20]
A
This represents the peak for a movement that began when Eugene V. Debs, a formal railroad union organizer, formed the first American socialist party in 1901. For 124 years, no socialist has come close to the kind of power that Zoran Mandani is about to seize if he wins the election next week. Yes, it's true. David Dinkins was technically a member of DSA's predecessor organization and nominally the DSA itself. But he was also a lifelong member of the Democratic Party. The DSA endorsed him in 1989 when he defeated the incumbent mayor of New York, Ed Koch, in the Democratic primary. But unlike Mamdani, David Dinkins didn't run his campaign as a socialist. He was a member of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders did come close in 2016 to winning the Democratic Party's nomination to be president. AOC and Rashida Tlaib are, of course, national political stars, but they are members of the House of Representatives. They are not anything close to the mayor of New York. None of them have the clout and power of a man who is all but certain to be occupying Gracie Mansion for the next four years. And he's only 34 years old. He's nearly half a century younger than Bernie Sanders. A socialist representing Astoria in the New York State assembly in Albany beat out the speaker of New York City Council, Adrian Adams, the City Comptroller Brad Lander, and scion of New York royalty, former Governor Andrew Cuomo. And last June in the Democratic primary.
- [05:08]
C
Today, eight months after launching this campaign with the vision of a city that every New Yorker could afford, we have won.
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D
When you enter a zoron rally or event, there is this overwhelming feel of optimism.
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This is my Free Press colleague Olivia Rheingold, who has been on the Mamdani beat for a year, since his humble beginning, polling at 1%.
- [05:41]
D
If you look closely or you listen hard enough, you know, some. Some cracks start to form, and perhaps the message is not as progressive as it seems. But on face value, a lot of people I speak with make the comparison to Obama. They say that the overwhelming feeling is. Is hope. And they believe that his message is one of positivity.
- [06:07]
A
You can see it. Zoran has a million dollar smile. Celebrities love him. He has tapped our national zeitgeist. Mamdani is cool. Check out his viral YouTube video in July. Brother Zoran, what's going on, man? This is Jabal Bowman. Tonight I have an extra ticket to the Wu Tang Clan concert in Madison Square. Gard, that voice you hear is former Congressman Jamaal Bowman, a fellow socialist. And over the course of two and a half minutes, the young Zoron is filmed as he is dapped up by New Yorkers on his way to the backstage of Madison Square Garden, where he talks recent New York political history with Wu Tang Clan lyricist rza. Could you imagine Andrew Cuomo, who is now running as an independent in the general election, doing that? I mean, maybe if it was Billy Joel at the Garden, but Wu Tang? You are part of that continuum too, my brother, as you're bringing new energy and ideas and authenticity and humanity. And Mamdani is promising what, on the surface are popular reforms. He wants to make the buses free.
- [07:21]
C
I'll make buses fast and free so.
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A
I can just get where I'm going. He wants to stop landlords from raising the rent.
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C
Leaks, rats, a literal beehive in the wall. Housing isn't just more expensive than ever, it's falling apart.
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A
And he also wants to globalize the Intifada.
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E
Do you condemn that phase?
- [07:41]
A
Globalize the Intifada, which a lot of.
- [07:42]
C
People hear is a call to violence against Jews? My concern is to start to walk down the line of language. And making clear what language I believe is permissible or impermissible takes me into a place similar to that of the President, who is looking to do those very kinds of things. Putting people in jail for writing an op ed, putting them in jail for protesting. Ultimately, it's not language that I use, it's language I understand there are concerns about. And what I will do is showcase my vision for the city through my words in my.
- [08:12]
A
Huh, that's weird. He doesn't use that language, but he won't condemn the phrase. Why not? The second intifada was a five year campaign of suicide bombings at bus stops, markets and synagogues. A globalized intifada would unleash terror against Jews all over the world. So why not just give a straight answer instead of dissembling on increasing hate crime prevention funding and voicing opposition to Donald Trump's crackdown on pro Hamas green card holders? I mean, one can oppose the ICE raids and deportations and still make it clear that the slogans of jihadists are wrong. And this has been a pattern.
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B
You won't say that Hamas should lay.
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A
Down their arms and give up leadership in Gaza.
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C
I don't really have opinions about the future of Hamas and Israel beyond the question of justice and safety and the fact that anything has to abide by international law.
- [09:09]
A
You don't have an opinion on whether the terrorists who started the Gaza war with a murder, rape and kidnapping spree two years ago should lay down their weapons. What? Well, Mamdani went into cleanup mode, sort of. Here he is at the first mayoral debate earlier this month.
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C
Of course I believe that they should lay down their arms. I'm proud to be one of the first elected officials in the state who called for a ceasefire. And calling for a ceasefire means ceasing fire. That means all parties have to cease fire and put down their weapons.
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A
Again with the both sides. The 20 point Trump peace plan doesn't call on the state of Israel to disarm, but Mamdani can't quite say Hamas should unless the Jewish state does as well. And then there was this Democratic candidate for New York City mayor.
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D
Zoran Mamdani is facing backlash after posting a photo with a Brooklyn imam linked to the Mastermind of the 1993 World Trade center bombing.
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In 2017, when Zoran was briefly a Soundcloud rapper, which might be disqualifying in and of itself for some, he released a song where he praises the Holy Land Five, the terrorism financiers who funneled some $12 million to Hamas. It is not who we are.
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C
We hold our freedoms are so very dead.
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A
We will never let this out. If you want to understand why Zahra Mamdani seems so reasonable on so many things except for the existence of the world's only Jewish state, well, it helps to look at his political party because the next mayor of New York is not a Democrat.
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C
Hello, DSA members.
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Zoran Mandani is a dues paying member of the Democratic Socialist of America, or dsa. Now, Mamdani does not hide this. He emphasizes that he is a democratic socialist, a distinction that once may have meant something. Unlike, say, the old American Communist Party or the Weather Underground. Democratic socialists are supposed to believe in redistributing wealth through persuasion, elections and organizing, not violent revolution. And the crazy thing is, is that the socialists are about to win a really important election, the most important in their entire history. At the very moment that the party has been taken over by illiberal revolutionaries who display hammers and sickles in their social media profiles the way white nationalists bear swastikas. Today, the DSA is run by activists enamored with the authoritarian left. Last year, the New York chapter gave a rapturous standing ovation for a speech by Cuba's deputy foreign minister. Its national program calls for a new constitution that replaces the House and Senate with a single federal legislature and places workers in charge of the federal government. The DSA supports the abolition of prisons and the defunding of the police. DSA's international committee has taken a neutral stance on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, calling on Russian troops to leave while opposing any US or NATO aid to Ukraine. Last year, the DSA signed on to an open letter respecting the rigged election in Venezuela, even after several independent observers and and Latin American governments themselves said that the dictator Nicolas Maduro had stolen it. But the biggest and most pressing and defining issue for the DSA in recent years has been Israel. The party now resembles the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade when it comes to that state. Here is the scene at the 2017 DSA Convention, when the party officially endorsed the the boycott, divestment and sanction of Israel. All those in favor of the resolution raise your voting cards.
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E
Thank you.
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All of those opposed? The motion carries.
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From the river to the sea Palestine.
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Will be free from the river to.
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The sea Palestine will be free from the river to the sea Palestine will be free from the river to the.
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A
Sea Palestine that chant, which has become so ubiquitous on campus in the last two years, comes right out of Hamas, except their version of it in Arabic says Palestine will be Arab. It's a direct call for the elimination of Israel. Here is Mamdani himself on August 4, 2023, two months before Hamas started the Gaza war with the October 7 massacre, explaining why he is a member of DSA.
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C
I was somebody who began my journey in organizing and in politics by co founding my school's first Students for Justice in Palestine. The the struggle for Palestinian liberation was at the core of my politics and continues to be. And so I struggled to find a home in New York City that could bring that politics in a sense of coherence with the politics I felt around the future of New York City. And here was this organization that endorsed bds, something which so many organizations that were composed of Muslims were struggling to do at the time. And so I found this organization where what won me over was the sincerity of was that sincerity that we mean what we say when we say we have a socialist politic. It is consistent, it is universal, and it stands for justice in every place with no exception.
- [15:23]
A
Now you may be thinking, what does the existence of Israel have to do with free health care and workers rights? It wasn't that long ago that American socialists professed solidarity with this country that was ruled by a socialist party for the first 30 years of its existence. But even if Israel was governed by Milton Friedman and F.A. hayek, it's bizarre that the cause of destroying this tiny nation state has come to define our own country's largest socialist party. In this respect, one could say that the DSA is Palestine first. We are listening to a DSA led march only 13 days after October 7, 2023. The party refused to condemn the perpetrators of the horror. Some chapters even celebrated this act of glorious resistance. An official DSA messaging kit after the pogrom included these talking points.
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B
Resistance comes in all forms.
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A
Armed struggle, general strike and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate and all of it is necessary. All of this was too much for a handful of some of the DSA OGs. One open resignation letter from two dozen ex members printed in the New Republic was withering.
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F
In its inability to distinguish between acts of resistance to unjust and oppressive rule and acts of terror against civilians, and in its confusion of authentic striving for national liberation with theocratic fascistic crimes, DSA has shown that it's become completely unmoored from the moral and political foundations of democratic socialism.
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A
So what happened? The DSA, which began in 1982, was originally meant to represent the left of the possible, to borrow the phrase of its founder, Michael Harrington. Its strategy was to drag the Democratic Party to the left, but in recent years, it opened its door to revolutionaries. It's very clear that these Trotskyist groups.
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G
These Marxist Leninist groups, these Maoist groups, they're a voting bloc in the national organization.
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This is historian and former DSA member Jake Altman.
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G
They control a majority of the votes. And so there's this real tension between the, you know, the people who have more pragmatic means and then the people.
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Who are these purists who believe that.
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They'Re going to start a vanguard party and have a revolution.
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This counts as an extraordinary irony because the Molotov throwers are about to have a comrade in City Hall. H.L. mencken once warned that democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. Five Barrows are about to find out why. I'm Eli Lake, and you're listening to Breaking History. In this episode, we tell New Yorkers what to know about their new ruling party, the history of Mehrmamdani's dsa, and the tragic arc of the man who founded that party, Michael Harrington. Keep it locked.
- [18:43]
B
The bag is better. You left the pot, you left the cheddar. Those dungarees and jiva sandals, your hacky sacked. It's hard to handle the FBS a little weather it was a mess, but now it's better. For 30 years, nobody notice now we get here and we are broken.
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F
We.
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Want to paint the eye and all the Bible 1c3 now we teach our PhDs and we want the XYZ we want to thank the new guys and all the times they took my side I promise to reside among the rags and fire.
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A
Before we get into the life of Michael Harrington, let's take a few minutes to talk about socialism in America. As most of you probably know, socialism is the ideology that stemmed from the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and others. We could do several hours on this, but the bottom line is that socialism is the creed that workers should own the means of production, that industry itself is a public good and should be controlled by the people, while all the other advanced industrialized democracies have major socialist parties that really compete for power. Think of the UK Labour Party. Here in the usa, socialism has been about as popular as the metric system. The Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901 by Eugene V. Debs, for example, won 6% of the popular vote in the 1912 presidential election. That was as well as it ever did. After he died in 1926, Norman Thomas, grandfather of longtime Newsweek editor and popular historian Evan Thomas, took over. Between 1928 and 1948, Norman Thomas ran for president six times, and each time barely made a dent. His high water mark was 1932, when he received a little more than 2% of the vote. And frankly, one can see why Norman Thomas wasn't very popular. We are socialists because we believe that this income which we all cooperate in making isn't divided as it ought to be. There were, of course, small victories here and there. Milwaukee elected a few socialist mayors in the 20th century. So did the thriving metropolis of Schenectady, New York. And of course, who could forget Reading, Pennsylvania? But let's be real. As a political force in American life, the socialist parties were a joke, the stereotype of the 20th century American socialist. An aging New Yorker with food stains on his sweater lecturing an audience of seven people at a public library in Brooklyn about Reaganomics. Woody Allen, I think, captured this best in the opening of Annie Hall.
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I think I'm going to get better as I get, you know, I think I'm going to be the balding, virile type, you know, as opposed to, say, the distinguished gray, for instance, you know, unless I'm neither of those two. Unless I'm one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism.
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A
Now, all of that said the intellectual influence of socialism as opposed to the political power of socialist parties was real. Many of the ideas in FDR's New Deal were borrowed from Norman Thomas and other socialists. Things like Social Security, public housing and a social safety net were first advocated by the socialists. And that's the context for understanding Michael Harrington. He would go on to found the Democratic Socialist of America, Mamdani's party. But before he did, he was an intellectual reformer who, who did his best to make the Democratic Party, led by Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, adopt the socialism of Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs. Harrington is largely forgotten today, but in the 1960s and 1970s and even the 1980s, he was a standard bearer for the American left. He coined the term neoconservative in a 1973 essay for dissent magazine where he attacked the first generation of ex leftists who were now leveling deep critiques of the welfare state that Harrington helped Inspire. Born in 1928 to a middle class family in St. Louis, Harrington began his public career in the Bowery of New York City as a disciple of the Catholic Workers Movement led by Dorothy Day. He took a vow of poverty and rose quickly to become the editor of the movement's newspaper, the Catholic Worker. But he was also a bit of.
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H
A skirt chaser and he was also a ladies man. He had tons of girlfriends, he was famous for that, from going from one to the other. And Dorothy Day. And he also smoked marijuana at the time.
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Briefly, this is historian and former DSA member Ron Radosh.
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H
Maybe he didn't. He did smoke pot later. But then he would advise all the people he was associated with not to do it. He said, would say, we gotta be serious and build a movement. And if going to do that, you have to get off drugs. But he, Dorothy Day said to him, look, Mike, you like women too much. You can't join our movement and take the vow of poverty and live here at the Catholic Worker house, which is what other people did. They lived there, sustaining themselves only in contributions for food. And they had rooms for the activists who built, who ran the newspaper free or it cost a penny, a Catholic Worker. And she said, think carefully, because I don't think you're made for this movement. So he wisely decided she's right, and he did not join the Catholic Worker movement full time.
- [24:54]
A
Harrington may have left the Catholic Workers movement, but he still cared a great deal about the workers themselves. And in the late 1950s, he joined the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas, which at that point counted only a few thousand deuce paying members. Still in his 20s, Harrington was blossoming into a public intellectual. His big break came in 1962 when he penned his most enduring work, the Other America, an expanded version of an essay he first wrote in 1958 for Commentary magazine. The book was a searing indictment of an America that didn't choose to see the poverty of millions of its neighbors.
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F
At precisely that moment in history where for the first time a people have the material ability to end poverty. They lack the will to do so. They cannot see, they cannot act. The consciences of the well off are the victims of affluence. The lives of the poor are the victims of a physical and spiritual misery.
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A
The influence of the other America remains with us today. Harrington popularized the concept of the culture of poverty, how being poor should not just be measured as a lack of money, but as the expectations for life passed down through generations. The influence was also felt in terms of major government programs. I will let William F. Buckley take.
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I
It from here, from whom you're about to hear and by whom I am about to be whiplashed. He is commonly acknowledged as the man who first declared the war on poverty, the only war he has ever declared, I hasten to add, since as regards orthodox wars, he is a conscientious objector. His most famous book, called the Other America, described a portion of the American population beset by tormenting poverty. That book caught the attention of Professor Walter Heller, who brought it to the attention of President Kennedy on 19 November 1963. That book was a toxin call for massive federal action to uproot American poverty. And President Kennedy tendered his approval for such a program and three days later died. But when Dr. Heller took the subject up with Mr. Kennedy's successor, Mr. Johnson reacted with enthusiasm. And so the war was born, towards the prosecution of which we're spending about $2 billion a year.
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A
This was on April 4, 1966, the debut episode of Buckley's Firing Line. For more on Buckley, I recommend our episode from a few back. We can really see here how Harrington gets to this idea of the left of the possible. He writes a book calling attention to the culture of poverty. And the President of the United States commits billions of dollars to to a new war on poverty. Why should a socialist party compete with Democrats when a Democratic president like Lyndon Johnson wants to implement socialist ideas? And at the same time, Harrington also understood that Johnson was not a socialist. He was a liberal reformer. And as such, Harrington saw his job was to keep pushing the Democrats from the Outside. Here he is on that firing line again with Buckley.
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I
First of all, I'm not a leader of the federal government's poverty program. Specifically, I was not offered a job, but I specifically did not take a job because although I appreciate the beginning effort and I'm for it, I want to be out calling for more and not saying that what we've done is enough, I don't believe it is. So I'm not a leader. Secondly, let me say unambiguously that there is nothing socialist or revolutionary about the present poverty program.
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A
All of this is particularly important to understanding Harrington's politics. On the one hand, he's willing to work within the system and credit reformers when they reform, but he still has his eyes on the big prize of social democracy. After the break, Harrington meets the new left and never quite recovers.
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I I was one of the authors.
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E
Of the Port Huron Statement.
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A
The original Port Huron Statement. Uh huh.
- [29:17]
E
Not the compromised second draft we just.
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A
Heard from the dude, the protagonist of the Big Lebowski, one of my favorite movies. I play that clip because it's a reference to the 1962 Port Huron Statement. There really were two drafts, and the second one really did try to water down the first one at the behest of more moderate socialists in the League of Industrial Democracy. The Port Huron Statement was the founding charter of Students for a Democratic Society, or sds. That's the main group that a few years later would turn college campuses into pitch battlefields over the Vietnam War. These were the activists that took over the campus buildings in Columbia in 1968 and helped organize the marches and riots in Chicago that year during the Democratic Convention. Now this is a general audience podcast, so I will not be going into great detail on the doctrinal differences between the various factions and sub factions of American socialism. But if you want to get a picture of this kind of thing, I really recommend Monty Python's Life of Brian. Listen, if you wanted to join a pfj, you'd have to really hate the Romans. I do.
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I
Oh yeah?
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F
How much? A lot.
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I
Right.
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E
You're in.
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A
Listen, the only people we ate more than the Romans. Judean People and the Judean Popular People Front.
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I
And the People's Front of Judea.
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A
The People's Front of Judea. Splitters. We're the People's Front of Judea. So we would come to know groups like SDS as the New Left. They were not like the socialists of the early and middle 20th century, like Norman Thomas or Eugene Debs, or for that matter, Michael Harrington. They were influenced by a new anti colonialism thinkers like Frantz Fanon and third World radicals like Che Guevara. Waiting for some party boss in the White House to read your book on poverty was too slow. The revolution was now. Now a little background is very important at this moment. The major American socialists up to this point, including of course, Michael Harrington, still pined for the end of concentrated capital. They thought that a powerful ruling class that controlled industry undermined our democracy. And at the same time, they were explicitly not revolutionary. The means mattered. Socialism in America should be achieved through persuasion and elections. Harrington and his acolytes opposed the Soviet Union. They wanted to make America more equitable, but they also did not want Moscow to win. The Cold War could not be said for other factions of the American left like the American Communist Party basically parroted whatever line they were getting from the premiere. So someone like Harrington could be a blistering critic of the US government when it came to civil rights or the lack of an adequate welfare state, but at the same time denounced the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 or its treatment of political prisoners. These were not contradictions for social democrats like Harrington. They represented a fidelity to socialist ideals. The burgeoning New Left, however, saw things differently. One of its leaders, a charismatic Californian named Tom Hayden, believed the old socialist anti Communism was making the case indirectly for American empire. For Hayden, anti communism was the mark of a controlled opposition incapable of really wanting to stop the Vietnam War. These two visions clashed in the summer of 1962 at a retreat owned by the United Auto Workers. Looking back on the Port Huron Statement today, it seems pretty tame compared to what would be coming in the 1960s. But at the time it was considered a radical break with the Socialist Party. It was the statement's section on international communism that caused all the trouble.
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F
But present trends in American anti communism are not sufficient for the creation of appropriate policies and with which to relate and to counter communist movements in the world. In no instance is this better illustrated than our basic national policy making assumption that the Soviet Union is inherently expansionist and aggressive, prepared to dominate the rest of the world by military means. On this assumption rests the monstrous American structure of military preparedness. Because of it, we sacrifice values and social programs to the alleged needs of military power.
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A
Now I should say that the preceding paragraph of the Port Huron Statement acknowledges all the evils of the Soviet system. But this wiggle room that we just heard, this neutralism, if you will, really bothered Harrington and the League of Industrial Democracy, which had initially sponsored Hayden's SDS to be its new youth wing. This was what the party called united frontism. They did not want any Communist loyal to Moscow inside their socialist big tent. In the spring leading up to the Port Huron convention, Harrington and Hayden went back and forth over the language. And while Harrington won a battle of sorts, when the first draft was revised to include stronger language condemning the Soviets, Harrington also sensed he lost the war for the future of American socialism. He lost the war for the youth. On July 6, Harrington called Hayden and his comrade Robert Allen Haberd before the League of Industrial Democracy. He intended to purge these disobedient whippersnappers from the party. Here's an account from Maurice Isserman's biography of Harrington, the other American. You knew this would send Lyd through the roof, Michael thundered at Hayden and Haber.
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This issue was settled on the left.
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A
10 or 20 years ago.
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G
And that you could countenance any united frontism now is inconceivable. When Hayden protested that if Michael would take the time to read the Port.
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A
Huron statement, he would see that it clearly condemned communism.
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G
Michael was unbending documents Schmockuments. Slayman and I said that this was antithetical to the lid and everything it stood for.
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A
The SDS was out. From the perspective of many old school socialists, this was the right thing to do. A few years later, on college campuses, the SDS would wave the flags of Third World revolutionaries and chant their admiration for Ho Chi Minh, the leader of Communist North Vietnam.
- [36:01]
E
So Harrington and I were really kind of in tandem, although a generation apart. And I very much looked up to him as a leader and a teacher and so on.
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A
This is Joshua Maravchik, a former national chairman of the youth wing of the Socialist Party, who himself would migrate closer to the right over time.
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E
We were not in sync with the New Left of that moment. And because the New Left, because we were very clear anti Communists, and that would apply, I mean, I've remained one forever. But Harrington was too, and it bothered him that we were out of sync with the New Left. There were all these thousands of activists on the college campuses. They may have started out being anti Vietnam War, but again that movement moved steadily leftward until it became not merely anti Vietnam, it wasn't anti Vietnam War, it was only anti America side in that war. But they would chant, ho Ho, Ho Chi Minh. The Viet Cong is going to win. So they made a leap to embrace the other side.
- [37:22]
A
So Harrington purged Hayden and Haber, but he always felt queasy about the whole Thing. He was only 33 years old at the time. The same age as Zoran Mamdani, I might add, when he began his campaign. And for the first time in his life, Michael Harrington felt middle aged. He was no longer part of the youth movement. This is Carl gershman, a former 60s socialist who would go on to create the National Endowment for Democracy.
- [37:49]
E
When they adopted the Port Huron Statement, which was the key statement to the founding of the New Left, and they basically rejected anti Communism, it led to a very sharp split between Harrington on the one hand, and the League for Industrial Democracy and Irving Howe and all those people. A very sharp split between them and Tom Hayden and the New Leftists. Harrington regretted that for the rest of his life. He was never going to allow anything like that to happen again.
- [38:19]
A
This is important. Gershman and Maravchik in the 1960s would eventually become the neoconservatives that Harrington would end up deriding in Dissent magazine. The reason was because they saw the New left in the 1960s, initially led by Tom Hayden and the SDS, as appeasers of evil. This wasn't because the old socialists believed in American imperialism. It was because they understood the dangers of left wing authoritarianism and totalitarianism. While SDS and the New Left gained momentum in the 1960s, Harrington gained control of the dwindling American Socialist Party. In 1968, Harrington would become its chairman. He would preside over its demise. In 1972, the party dissolved. To get a sense of where American socialism was heading in 1972, consider the June 1969 SDS Convention in Chicago. This is the year of the Great Break. A group of radicals conducted a push, pushing out the mainstream leadership, who were fine with riots and building takeovers on campus, but had nonetheless failed a revolutionary purity test. Within a few months, the organization would fall apart and the new leaders would now call themselves the Weather Underground. Here is some footage from that convention. I'm Mike Clonsky, National Secretary of sds, and this is Bernadine Dorn, Interorganizational Secretary. Is there a Communist faction making a big power play for sds? Is there any Communists back here? I guess there is. Remarkable. It was only seven years earlier that the Port Huron Statement, with its mild critique of anti Communism was was enough for Michael Harrington to purge Tom Hayden and Robert Alan Haber from the League of Industrial Democracy. Now, the SDS was run by activists who proudly identified with international communism. One might think a man like Harrington, now in his early 40s, would take a lesson from all of this. The same lesson of the past socialist leaders, perhaps no collaboration with radicals. But this is not the lesson that Harrington learned. He got soft.
- [40:39]
E
I don't think he ever changed away from his anti communism, which is why a lot of the people who have taken over DSA hate him, because he never gave that up. But he thought that by embracing them, he could win them to his view.
- [41:03]
A
This is Joshua Muravchik again.
- [41:06]
E
And his view also became murkier when it got to Third World revolutionaries who were not official communists but who were certainly not democrats. So he later. His most famous book was called the Other America, about poverty in America. Some dozen years later, 15 years later, he published a book about the third world and was called the Other World. And in the front of the book, the book is dedicated to Julius Nyerere, who was the dictator of Tanzania. And there was not a shred of democracy in Tanzania under Nyereri.
- [41:55]
A
So to back up after the Socialist Party of America dissolves in 1972, Harrington formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. A year later, the New Party was still trying to be democratic socialists. Harrington never gave up on influencing the Democratic Party. He never gave up on persuasion in elections. But at the same time, he had dropped his opposition to a united front. Eventually, in 1982, the De Soc, as it was known, merged with the New American Movement, which itself was a loose political organization for former Communists and New Left activists who were not willing to become domestic terrorists like the Weather Underground, but still really liked the ideology.
- [42:40]
H
The New American Movement came out of those Marxist Leninists, largely who left the Communist Party out of embarrassment that they had been supporting Stalin and Stalinism for so long. But they didn't change their ideology.
- [42:55]
A
This is Ron Radosh again.
- [42:57]
H
They still believed in revolutionary Communism. They came in to DSA and these ex Communists, like the famous Communist Party chairwoman in California, who built up one of the most vital Communist Party groups in the west coast, the Communist Party USA under the leadership of Dorothy Healy. Dorothy Healy quit the Communist Party by that time and she went with the New American Movement people into this new organization, the Democratic Socialists of America. And at first she was very wary. She said, I can't be in an organization that Irving Howe was in. Because Irving Howe was against the stance taken by at the Port Huron movements when they agreed to let communist into the youth organization. Howe and Harrington pulled out. Would have nothing to do with it. And it was under Howe's leadership and emphasis in particular. Howe was aghast at having the Communists come into a democratic youth movement. He was trying to build. So these former Communists, including the former chairman of the Communist Party USA in California, joined DSA and a lot of people followed her.
- [44:21]
A
Rados knows of what he speaks. In 1982, he was a member of the New American Movement and he was personally recruited to the new DSA by Michael Harrington himself.
- [44:33]
H
In fact, when I came into dsa, I had met with Harrington, very friendly. Harrington essentially recruited me. He said, you can have any position you want, but there are two things you have to accept. We consider the Soviet Union a totalitarian country that we oppose when we oppose American capitalism. He said, I'm a student of Max Schachtman who believe developed this idea that the Soviet Union was not a failed socialist society like Trotsky believed, but are still socialists. It just had to be reformed. They believed socialism was developed in Russia. It had to be a revolution to destroy the whole system there. Harrison said, you have to accept Shankar's view of the Soviet Union and you have to accept that we're pro Israel 100% and we align ourselves with the Israeli government.
- [45:34]
A
Oh, that's interesting, especially given the DSA's solidarity today with the Islamo fascist organizations that seek to destroy Israel. But I don't credit Harrington too much. He enabled the evolution by inviting the illiberal Marxists into his big tent in the first place. For the final years of Harrington's life, he toiled in relative obscurity. His DSA never gained any traction. During the Reagan Revolution in 1991, the DSA had 10,000 members. By way of contrast, it has more than 80,000 today. The world had moved on. Harrington died of esophageal cancer on July 31, 1989, just three months before the Berlin Wall came down. I don't doubt that he would have celebrated the end of the East German prison state. He would have also celebrated the end of the Soviet Union. But the rest of his organization at this point was ambivalent. The January February 1992 issue of the Democratic Left, which is the DSA's official party organ, for example, made barely a mention of the collapse of the Soviet Union in its issue that year. Instead, it focused on policies to recover from the Republican recession, as they called it. And looking at the Swedish economic model, the DSA would remain in obscurity for the 1990s and the 2000s. One bright spot was a socialist mayor in Burlington, Vermont, a former honorary chairman of the DSA who in later years would allow his membership to lapse. You may have heard of him. His name was Bernie Sanders. Here he is in 1985 praising the illiberal Sandinistas who had taken over Nicaragua.
- [47:23]
I
Sandinista government, in my view, has more.
- [47:25]
A
Support among the Nicaraguan people, substantially more support than Ronald Reagan has. Leaving aside the fact that Reagan won 49 states in the 1984 election, five years after Bernie predicted more Nicaraguans supported the Sandinistas than Americans supported, supported Ronald Reagan. The radical Socialists were voted out of power in the first free election since the revolution in 1979. Well, Bernie would go on to energize American socialism in a way that seemed impossible at the end of Harrington's life. My view of democratic socialism builds on the success of many other countries around the world who have done a far better job than we have in protecting the needs of their working families, their elderly citizens, their children, their sick and their poor. Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system which is corrupt, that we must create an economy that works for all and not just the very wealthy. That was the beginning of Bernie's campaign in 2015 for the Democratic Party's nomination and he nearly won, winning 46% of the pledged delegates that year, putting a major scare into Hillary Clinton. That spark of momentum led to a new generation of DSA leaders.
- [48:56]
C
As my sister Ayanna Pressley likes to.
- [48:59]
A
Say, the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.
- [49:03]
B
Every genocide enabler. Look at this rooms motherfuckers. We ain't going anywhere.
- [49:10]
A
The only answer to growing autocracy is firing up the engines of our grassroots democracy. And now Zoran Mamdani is expected to become the next mayor of New York City. He has tried his best to moderate some of his positions. For example, he recently said he would not have a Zionism litmus test for his administration. Bravo. Olivia Rheingold went on the DSA message boards which is available only to dues paying members to see the reaction this.
- [49:43]
D
One user he wrote, I want Zoran to publicly apologize to the Palestinian community regarding his recent statements and put a policy in place to check that no one on his staff was holds positive views of Zionism. If not, I will write a proposal to my chapter to censure him and I hope other chapters follow suit. Someone commented on that and they said please do this. Then there was infighting of, you know, the fact that Zorin has said that there could be Zionists in his administration. Can we live with this? Do we need to censure him? And to me this is a strong sign of buckle up like the dsa. Yes, historically they have been his greatest supporters. But they are going to scrutinize everything he's doing. And maybe he doesn't want to have a litmus test of his staff members positions on Israel, but the DSA is going to have litmus tests of their own and they're going to watch what he does very closely.
- [50:48]
A
This wouldn't be the first time the DSA turned on one of its stars this year. The party came very close to purging AOC herself after she voted for US funding for a missile defense system for Israel known as Iron Dome. In some ways this is to be expected.
- [51:05]
E
It's true that there is a variety of opinion within dsa.
- [51:10]
A
This is Joshua Muravchik again.
- [51:12]
E
There's left and further left and still further left. But what happened now is that the group that has taken over the executive bodies elected at this recent convention is now the far left, which really has no even a residual connection to democracy. The people it admires in the world are communists and other totalitarian or authoritarian socialist revolutionaries, what have you.
- [51:50]
A
We did some of our own on the ground reporting. We sent our producer Adam Feldman out to a party meeting in Bushwick, Brooklyn to get the mood after Mamdani pledged to retain the current police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, if he is to win the Merrill election next week. Here's what he had to say.
- [52:10]
G
I went to a kind of run down back porch of a bar in Bushwick, Brooklyn. There was the main bar area that was open to anybody else. And then in this back porch area it was a meeting of Reform and Revolution, a caucus of the DSA. And it was a meeting of about 40 people in a kind of marijuana filled back porch room, lot of beer, kind of chatting away. It was an informal meeting of sorts in which a few leaders of Reform and Revolution Caucus got up to speak and then it was open to the broader attendees to ask questions, give comments, all related to how should Zoron govern. There was a consistent level of disappointment of Zoron's more recent statements, of him moderating, trying to appeal to more people in the center to prove that he's not this big scary guy. What all the headlines say about about him. So that's including saying that he would have Zionist in his administration. Not being a litmus test. The reported rumors that he'd keep Commissioner Tisch on apologizing about calling the police racist and calling to defund them. There absolutely was resistance to that and they were upset about it. But also they weren't surprised. There seemed to be a consensus that they all knew that they're all quite cynical about how electoral politics work and that they knew that Zoran would be doing these kinds of acts to try and make himself more palatable to the average New Yorker.
- [53:44]
A
So one possible future under a Mamdani mayoralty will be that the party's radical leaders will alienate their most powerful comrade, and Mamdani himself will be freer to govern less ideologically. Let's just say that's a best case scenario. But I am not convinced this will be the case. Mamdani has already gotten important endorsements from mainstream New York Democrats like Governor Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. As of press time, the only major New York Democrat to hold out is Senator Chuck Schumer. So instead of asking what success may mean for the dsa, perhaps we should ask what accommodation may mean for the Democratic Party. Will it go the way of SDS and the DSA itself, opening its doors to radicals, only to find over time that the radicals themselves prevail? That is the lesson that Michael Harrington once understood way back in 1962, only to spend the rest of his life unlearning it. Mamdani, by all accounts, remains committed to his radical principles. As he told his comrades in 2023, he joined the party because they were the only ones willing to support the boycott, sanction and divestment of Israel. How long will it take before Mamdani's new political party takes on the radicalism of his old one?
- [55:25]
B
Your hacky stack is hard to handle but little well it was a mess but now it's better all three Nobody know this now we are here and we our best news now we teach a PhD and we run the NYC I want to thank the New York Times and all the times they took my side Our compass to Visa I wonder if you see me dance and all the time we're like the rest but they were rhymes we like the tax and spend your dollar we stole the rich and stomping high we all desire Step up again and tell you both times stand for DSA New York was real soon nothing for sale and everything's free and all big 501 secrets now we teach you ph and we won the the NYCA want to thank the New York Times and all the times they took my side among the ranking fire and all the 501.
- [57:57]
E
And.
- [57:57]
A
Doug here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat helping people custom their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally. Doug Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.