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Chris Hayes asked Bernie Sanders on Thursday night about a man who died way back in 1989.
The Democratic Socialists of America were founded by Michael Harrington, Hayes reminded his MS NOW audience, and Harrington argued that socialists should work inside the Democratic Party as “the left wing of the possible.”
Sanders, in his younger years, wanted a clean break and new parties. The two, as Hayes put it, ran in the same circles and never settled the question between them.
Sanders conceded the argument, more or less. A successful third party is “very difficult to start,” he said.
“It just requires all kinds of money” and means “overcoming all kinds of state restrictions.”
As he pointed out, he ran for president twice inside the Democratic primary.
Before he touched strategy at all, though, he offered something closer to a eulogy for the late political activist.
“He was a wonderful, wonderful man,” Sanders said of Harrington, a man he admitted he never knew well. “He was involved with the Catholic Worker, as you may recall.”
Watch the exchange:
That aside points to a history most of the DSA’s admirers and nearly all of its enemies have forgotten — it was birthed in the heart of the Catholic Church.
Here’s the full story.
