Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than to submit to the desolation of … - Michael Harrington

The New Deal, for all its achievements and the popular idealism which inspired it, has become status quo. Its genuine gains, such as Social Security, must be defended and extended, of course. But the real task, for the democratic Left and for the nation, is now to go beyond the New Deal. Far beyond it.

To be sure, the other America is not impoverished in the same sense as those poor nations where millions cling to hunger as a defense against starvation. This country has escaped such extremes. That does not change the fact that tens of millions of Americans are, at this very moment, maimed in body and spirit, existing at levels beneath those necessary for human decency. If these people are not starving, they are hungry, and sometimes far with hunger, for that is what cheap foods do. They are without adequate housing and education and medical care.

It is an intolerable irony that societies that are anything but socialist should thus define what socialism is in the eyes of so many. It is an irony that has to be undone.