Books: 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.