As Harrington grew older, he tired of the dank self-righteousness and sharp-elbowed polemical style of left sectarianism. How one argues, Harrington came to understand, was as important as what one argued. Writing in 1962 in Dissent, where he was now an editor, he warned radical elders not to react too hastily when they heard students in the nascent New Left espousing naïve or wrongheaded views about, say, the Castro regime in Cuba. Those views “must be faced and changed,” he wrote, but “the persuasion must come from someone who is actually involved in changing the status quo” and “has a sympathy for the genuine and good emotions which are just behind the bad theories.”

Famously and unfortunately, within a few months, Harrington proceeded to ignore his own better instincts, denouncing the founders of the new campus group Students for a Democratic Society for espousing what he regarded as insufficiently anti-Communist views (a fair criticism of the group in the later 1960s, when I was a member, but way off the mark in 1962). He almost immediately regretted the blunder, but the damage had been done. As he wrote a quarter-century later, he had been guilty of “rude insensitivity to young people struggling to define a new identity, and of treating “fledgling radicals trying out their own ideas for the first time as if they were hardened faction fighters.”

Politics of the Possible vs. Politics of Pretend Combat

Few of today’s new D.S.A. members, three decades after Harrington’s death, are “hardened faction fighters.” They have been described as “nondenominational socialists,” in search of a political community of like-minded activists, more concerned with practical results than ancient political feuds, all of which is to their credit.

But, like their predecessors in previous radical generations, including the young Michael Harrington, some will be drawn, at least for a time, to whatever policy and doctrine seems to promise the greatest personal sense of moral purity. There are newly organized caucuses within D.S.A. that seek to push the organization further leftward, in directions antithetical to the Harrington tradition. Indeed, in some quarters of D.S.A., “Harringtonite” has become a term of abuse, used to demean people who emphasize practicality and compromise.

Amid all the promising signs of growth, youth, energy and imagination, the old familiar tensions between a politics of the possible and a politics of pretend combat on the plains of destiny have re-emerged.