As the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — newly grown to more than sixty thousand members — prepare to meet in Atlanta this weekend, it will have been exactly thirty years since the death of the organization’s founder.

Michael Harrington, who kept the idea and promise of democratic socialism alive and relevant in a time when the world was moving to the right, died of esophageal cancer on July 31, 1989. He’d spent his final months writing the last of his sixteen books — an account of the global corporate autocracy he feared would dominate the twenty-first century, and a scholarly, nuanced, yet impassioned case for the socialism he saw as the only alternative to capitalism’s brave new repressive world.

When Harrington founded DSA’s predecessor, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), in 1973, it was not a propitious moment for socialism. The New Left had shattered into sects, the New Deal coalition had irreparably broken apart, the labor movement was losing both members and direction, and Soviet communism, however sclerotic, still loomed large enough to constitute most Americans’ idea of socialism.