How the DSA Went From the Margins to the Mainstream

In March 1982, about 6,000 people gathered in Detroit to launch what they hoped would become America’s democratic socialist movement. The average age in the room was somewhere north of 60.

The founding chairman was Michael Harrington, a Catholic intellectual who had advised Martin Luther King Jr. and wrote The Other America: Poverty in the United States, the book that helped inspire President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. He coined a slogan for his new organization that was either a sober assessment of political reality or a subtle admission of defeat, depending on your view: the left wing of the possible.