Tributes to Michael Harrington
Berman, Paul
Where did he get the energy? Apart from his amazing productivity and range of activities, he even looked energetic, like a light bulb. Not having been among his personal friends, I have no...
...Political ideas, though, if they have any merit, must show a human form...
...Was this because he updated his ideas to include a few of ours...
...I don't know how Harrington would have articulated this truth...
...We like to think that political principles are self-contained, that our world view stands on its own, that attractive and decent theories of political economy draw us forward and will draw others, too...
...They lived and breathed...
...Politics, though, is more than program...
...On the contrary...
...They were a man...
...I observed him from a seat in the fifteenth row...
...We cheered because when Harrington walked to the podium, our own instincts about the democratization of society, the stupidity of present inequalities, the need for controlling wealth, the central role of labor and of feminism, the wisdom of ecology, the ideal of an economy based on workers' control—these, our several political reasons for being, became more than principles...
...They beamed...
...we banged our drum...
...Some of us who took to politics through Students for a Democratic Society and allied movements of the New Left did not enter into political adulthood as Harrington's admirers...
...That was his genius...
...We insist on this, whether we know it or not...
...We were righteous...
...Not having been among his personal friends, I have no intimate insight into this mystery...
...But it was obvious from the way he behaved that he understood it perfectly...
...But that was the ideal place for noticing what the energy managed to achieve...
...They took on traits that pertain to character, but not necessarily to politics: honor, honesty, tolerance, humor, sagacity, culture...
...But when we finished banging, we quietly filed into the auditorium along with everyone else, and we made no explanation of our change of heart, not even to ourselves, and when he got up to speak, we cheered as if we had counted ourselves Harringtonians all along...
...If the spirit won't become flesh, it won't even be, in the end, spirit...
...Even those of us who would never criticize his anticommunism faulted him for what seemed, to our overradical eyes, an excessive Fabian moderation and an infuriating slowness to mobilize against the Vietnam War, which was indeed the one great blunder in his life...
...Of course it was—even if agreement never extended, as it never can, to every single issue or campaign...
...WINTER • 1990 • 105...
...Because he convinced us of his own essential correctness...
...We want them to stand before us and radiate, like body heat or the light from someone's eye...
...The political leader who advocated American socialism managed also to embody it...
Vol. 37 • January 1990 • No. 1
