Day doesn't seem to have rejected her radicalism. The bohemian lifestyle, yes, but not the philosophy of Gov't.
We believe that social security legislation, now hailed as a great victory for the poor and for the worker, is a great defeat for Christianity. It is an acceptance of the Idea of force and compulsion. It is an acceptance of Cain's statement, on the part of the employer. "Am I my brother's keeper?" Since the employer can never be trusted to give a family wage, nor take care of the worker as he takes care of his machine when it is idle, the state must enter in and compel help on his part. Of course, economists say that business cannot afford to act on Christian principles. It Is impractical, uneconomic. But it is generally coming to be accepted that such a degree of centralization as ours is impractical, and that there must be decentralization. In other words, business has made a mess of things, and the state has had to enter in to rescue the worker from starvation.
Of course, Pope Pius XI said that, when such a crisis came about, in unemployment, fire, flood, earthquake, etc., the state had to enter in and help.
But we in our generation have more and more come to consider the state as bountiful Uncle Sam. "Uncle Sam will take care of it all. The race question, the labor question, the unemployment question."
We will all be registered and tabulated and employed or put on a dole, and shunted from clinic to birth control clinic. "What right have people who have no work to have a baby?" How many poor Catholic mothers heard that during those grim years before the war!
As you observe, Augustine rejected Manichaeism. However, Day continued to associate with and present an unrealistic and sanitized account of those whose lives resembled her bohemian past. She tolerated and enabled sexual immorality at the Catholic Worker farms. When I visited Tivoli in 1971 I was puzzled and confused by the things I observed, and naively thought Dorothy must not be aware of the goings-on, such as a couple living together without benefit of clergy. But her diary (”The Duty of Delight,” 2011) reveals that she knew what was happening (pp. 419, 454), decided to sell the farm (p. 486), and then took 10 years to do so (p. 675).
In addition, Day allowed Ammon Hennacy to remain a “Catholic” Worker (he had become Catholic because Dorothy was Catholic) after he married outside the Catholic Church. Ironically, Joan Thomas, Ammon’s second wife, met him at the CW after Day had told her, “Oh, you must meet Ammon. He knows all about fasting. And he likes pretty girls”; Thomas found this “an extremely puzzling remark for a bona fide Christian woman” to make (Joan Thomas,”The Years of Grief and Laughter,” 1974, p. 7). Day eulogized him in “Ammon Hennacy: Non-Church’ Christian” (CW,February 1970).