We all know the Michael Harrington of The Other America, but the seventies Harrington reveals a very complex intellectual struggling with a world he was not expecting. He could see the creeping rise of the right, but continued to pursue an optimistic agenda despite his own read on the situation. His observations tended to be very keen and complex, and I often followed his leads when I was writing the book. I also learned a lot about remaining positive, but not unrealistically so, about prospects for social change in hard times as I watched Harrington confront the decade. I even named one of my chapters, “A Collective Sadness,” after a brilliant, melancholy, essay he wrote for Dissent in 1974.

A few examples stand out. He put a lot of energy into the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, but was also pretty critical of its prospects (he wrote a piece called “Two Cheers for Socialism” in Harper’s that was very revealing). Unlike many leftists at the time, he understood that the left depended upon liberalism being strong in order to build upon. Others saw it differently, operating from the idea that if activist tore down liberalism then people would move to the “true” left. Wrong! Similarly, he realized the left had made a mistake by thinking it could “liberate” people from traditional crutches like nationalism, god, flag and the like. Yet they failed to put another story in their place besides vague ideas of “freedom.” The negative or “anti” positions of the New Left had been stronger than the positive alternative vision it put forth. He believed this created a space for the right rather than the left by the early eighties.