Harrington, DSA, North Star, and Me

The North Star caucus is seen as the repository of the old-timers who founded Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), kept it barely alive through dark times for decades, and who now find themselves thrust aside by the new kids on the block, chiefly radicalized refugees from one of the Bernie Sanders’s campaigns.

I cannot claim to be wholly representative of the caucus, but there are at least a few of us who would take some pains to distinguish themselves from the stereotype. I come to DSA from its left myself. There are some others in that respect.

Take Michael Harrington. Please! I never liked him. He was the enemy, another liberal scold. I may have come around to many of his views after all this time, but I still have a few nits to pick.

Let’s recall first that he was not much in sync with Students for a Democratic Society, even before SDS turned Marxist-Leninist. It took him a while to figure out the Vietnam War was a bad policy for the U.S., when that issue was one of the two preoccupations of the New Left. (The other was racism.)

I recall Harrington proclaiming that the U.S. “is not an imperialism.” Of course it was! And is.

Then there’s his big book, The Other America. (I haven’t read his others.) It is said to have had an important, positive effect on public awareness of poverty. Perhaps so. But analytically it is pretty bad.

In a nutshell, the book “otherizes” the poor and destroys the idea of an exploited working class.

Just as a factual matter, roughly half of “the poor” are only so for a limited length of time. Many more are transitionally poor than suffer low income indefinitely. Poverty for most who are ever poor is fluid, temporary. Moreover, the socialist movement’s interests go well beyond the trials of the poor, however defined.

Then there was Harrington’s weakness for the idea of a culture of poverty. Liberal sympathy founded on condescension. The idea of permanent poverty matches up with the idea of inherent characteristics that condemn families to that status on an intergenerational basis. They may not have bad genes, but they have nasty habits. Any such characteristics of course could not hold for the occasionally poor. You can’t have a chronic disease in abbreviated spells.

There is intergenerational poverty, but as an analysis of the intergenerational poor, as for all of the ever-poor, Harrington lets oppressors off the hook. In The Other America, there are no bad guys. Poverty is a tragedy, not a crime.

The lightweight theoretical substrate of the book is tipped by a chapter on the voluntarily poor — bohemians. (This was pre-hippie.) Such choices had nothing to do with the enduring problems underlying poverty, however defined, but reflect a dim, journalistic standpoint.

Harrington had no edge. He was a butter knife.