As names and titles and ideologies become blurred and distorted in recent years, the old adage that if you repeat a lie over and over enough times it winds up becoming fact certainly rings true where the subject of Socialism pops up. The tendency of our media and our friends on the right wing side of the spectrum to paint Liberals with the same brush as Socialists is one of those stereotypes that just ain't so.

From the same batch of interviews that gave us Saul Alinsky earlier this week, I also ran across an interview recorded two weeks later, also for Harper's Magazine and their weekly radio program At Issue, with Michael Harrington. A name not mentioned much these days, Michael Harrington was an American Socialist, political activist and Political Science Professor who was also founder of the Democratic Socialists Of America. A writer of several books, the most popular being The Other America: Poverty In The United States which came out in 1962. Since his death in 1989 he's been largely overlooked and mostly forgotten where discussions of political ideology are concerned. Too bad. Perhaps Harrington isn't as catchy a name as Alinsky.

In this interview he talks about the differences between Liberalism and Socialism:

Michael Harrington: “The Liberal is convinced that working within the structure of a Capitalist society, no matter how modified, still a Capitalist society; an ameliorated, reformist welfare-state Capitalist society. But a society in which wealth is systematically maldistributed. That working within the framework of such a society it’s possible to achieve a just social order through reform without attacking the basic fundamentals of the society, the structure of the society. I believe, and Socialists believe, that as long as you have that fundamental structure of inequality, every reform is going to be eviscerated or subverted. For example; although most people don’t know it, the money spent on public housing in the United States is about half the value of one tax deduction for the homebuilding, middle-class and rich. In 1962 we spent about $865 million on Public housing and that tax deduction for the one-fifth top income recipients in this country was worth a $Billion and a Half. Or let me take an example from Europe which is sited in my article in the current issue of Harper’s: In Europe, when industry was nationalized, the main recipient of benefit from that nationalization, and I’m in favor of it, but the main recipient of benefits from it was private industry.”

An insightful interview with more than the average number of eerie prophecies, particularly since the interview was conducted in February 1970.

More essential listening.

The name Saul Alinsky rings few or no bells with most people these days, aside from near constant references by the likes of Gingrich and Beck to paint him as the personification of evil. As a figure in the social movements going back to the 1930's he was well known as probably one of the cornerstone figures in community organizing, whose ideas became the foundation for much of the 60's social movements in civil rights and protest to the Vietnam War. Affiliated with no political organizations and not having much use for mainstream political leaders, Alinsky sought to give power to people who had no power. He once said that Machiavelli's book The Prince was written as a blueprint for the Haves to hold on to power, while Alinsky wrote Rules For Radicals as a blueprint for the Have-nots on how to take it away.

At the time of this interview, in February 1970 for Harper's Magazine and their weekly radio program At Issue, Alinsky is interviewed on the occasion of the reissue of his 1946 book Reveille For Radicals and discusses where the radical movement has gone and where it's going.

So now you know when someone asks you who Saul Alinsky is.

That's why we're here.

During all the recent brouhaha over Joe McGinnis' Sarah Palin adventures, it hadn't occurred to me (or a lot of people, for that matter) that this was the same Joe McGinnis who wrote the landmark non-fiction book The Selling of The President: 1968, in which McGinnis detailed, perhaps for the first time in history, the inner-machinations of electing a President in the United States by means of Public Relations and Marketing.

Since 1968 was a particularly bloody year for politics, the release of this book, chronicling the events and the marketing behind a Presidential campaign were revelatory. No one had done it before, and the end result was looking at the whole process of selecting a President much differently than ever before.

That's not to say there weren't elaborate ad campaigns and Advertising Agencies involved in Political campaigns before 1968, we just weren't privy to them in a way we became after that election.

Here is a radio interview with Joe McGinnis, done for the weekly syndicated series At Issue for Harper's Magazine in February 1970.

Yes, things were rather different back then.