Between Feasibility & Utopia

TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC LEFT by Michael Harrington. 314 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

Socialist Michael Harrington is one of the last of the political evangelists--by temperament more Old Left than New Left. He comes on, in the words of Britain's best America-watcher, D. W. Brogan, like a pastor at the moment of decadence. In The Other America, Harrington heaped coals on the heads of his middle-class pewholders by exposing the suffering of the "invisible poor"--and helped make it a new priority of national concern. In this book, Harrington attempts Jeremiah's longest leap: from the catalogue of sins to the calculus of redemption. "The American system doesn't seem to work any more," he says, and in Toward a Democratic Left proposes what he calls "practical intimations of a new civilization" for the U.S.

In emphasizing the practical, Harrington makes concessions that neither the Old Left of idealistic socialism nor the New Left of angry anarchism is likely to applaud. But he is dealing with only the next 20 years of American life, and, he observes accurately, it is not realistic "to expect that the American people will decide to transform capitalism during that period." To get something done, one must "locate a radical program midway between immediate feasibility and ultimate Utopia." He has little patience with calls for instant destruction of the existing order: "A hazy apocalypse is no substitute for an inadequate liberalism."

Traditional Optimism. Harrington's point of departure is the 1964 election and the legislation that followed from it in 1965, which at long last completed the program of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. "Everyone except the Neanderthals agreed on Federal management of the economy, the goal of full employment, Medicare, formal legal equality for Negroes and, above all, economic growth." As a result, traditional American liberalism lost its innovative thrust, argues Harrington, and is unable to cope with the persisting problems of poverty, urban blight, inadequate education and racial hostility. To Harrington, nothing is more dangerous than the traditional American optimism that says, "However miserable the present may be, there is always hope for the future."

He does not sufficiently prove his thesis. Indeed, he gives the impression of having researched this book the way Sinclair Lewis used to research a novel: by filling a trunk not only with his own notes but also with every newspaper or magazine clipping that might some day serve to make a point. Many of his statistics come from Government reports, and he naturally leans most heavily on the bleakest. Still, some of the citations are deeply disturbing: children under 18 compose 42% of America's poor; the average Negro who finishes high school has a mathematical ability below eighth-grade level and a reading ability not much higher; the President's Council of Economic Advisors estimates that only 22% of America's poor receive any kind of welfare or public assistance.

Creating the Sums. Harrington argues that the distressing future the figures portend can be forestalled only by a radical transformation in both economics and politics. The profit motive must give up its place as the primary mainspring in American life, yielding to "a cooperative, rather than a competitive, ethic." To solve the nation's problems, money must be allocated "uneconomically," in the historical sense of the word, and "wasted" on such uncommercial values as "racial and class integration, beauty and privacy."

Harrington's plea for a cooperative ethic comes, curiously, at a time when the enforced cooperative societies around the world--the Communist countries--are rediscovering the necessity of the profit motive as a solution to their own internal problems. More important, he fails to suggest what force could replace the profit motive and still produce the vast sums the U.S. needs to solve its problems.

Planning for the Future. Harrington in effect demands a change in human nature--and an American willingness to accept the taxes and the "well-intentioned, genteel totalitarianism" of a Government giving first priority to the "criteria of social need." He does not say exactly so, but seems to be well aware that no such large cooperative society has ever been achieved without strong coercion. The political transformation he envisions is a vast, new coalition of the Left--most likely taking over the Democratic Party--made up of the poor, both white and Negro, a "reinvigorated labor movement," and the Galbraithean "scientists, technicians, teachers and professionals" of the "new class."

Such a new majority would entirely rebuild America's slums and provide first-rate schooling for all. It would offer jobs for all who wanted to work, and a guaranteed annual income for those who did not or could not. Through the White House and congressional committees, realistic planning for the future would take place regularly.

In all this, Harrington does not write with the conviction of a man who believes that his vision will come to pass. But as in The Other America, his book does ring with an urgent and passionate concern about problems that deserve serious attention.

In Toward a Democratic Left, Author Harrington, 40, is recapitulating in dialectical terms his own crablike glide to the right in search of greater political influence. The goal, he said recently, "is to maintain your ideals without becoming irrelevant, without just sitting up on a hilltop spinning theories." To that end, he has joined the Independent Democrats on his home turf in Greenwich Village, thinks now that he made a mistake in not voting for John Kennedy in 1960. "I came to the conclusion," he admitted, "that to call upon the liberals and radicals to leave the Democrats and join the Socialists was not effective."

Under whatever label, Harrington still puts in compulsive 16-hour days carrying his message to labor unions, college kids, civil rights groups and social-welfare organizations. He makes about ten speeches a month, and will be a principal speaker at the Poor People's March in Washington this month. Greying and intense, he delivers the word like an old-line Socialist trained by Jesuits.

Compensations. Son of a patent lawyer, Harrington was educated at Holy Cross, Yale and the University of Chicago, and became "hooked on poverty" when he took a welfare job at 21 in his home town, St. Louis. He went East in 1950, for the next twelve years wrote articles on civil rights, trade unionism and poverty for Commentary, Commonweal, the Reporter and Dissent. His book The Other America, published in 1962, was an expansion of an article on poverty that he had written for Commentary in 1959.

"In some ways I'm tired of being the author of The Other America," says Harrington, mostly because he would like to get a wider hearing on such other subjects as civil rights, peace, and the proposition that "labor unions still have a relevance to the Democratic left." There are compensations, of course. The book has not only made his name but also provided a sort of guaranteed annual income, selling a steady 200,000-odd copies a year in paperback and 5,000 in hardcover. He and his wife Stephanie, 31, a writer for the weekly newspaper the Village Voice, have moved from their status-conscious $65-a-month tenement to bourgeois, $200-a-month digs in the Village, hung with paintings given them by such artist friends as Alexander Calder and Larry Rivers. And this summer, the Harringtons and their firstborn son Alexander will luxuriate on the sands of Southampton, the single richest summer colony among the money-dunes of eastern Long Island.

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