“The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution.” Every New Leftist in the late 1960s was familiar with that axiom, attributed to Fidel Castro, and most took it to heart. Yet in a leaderless movement, there were numerous ways to comply. Some sought to advance the revolution with marches demanding the U.S. pull out of Indochina right away, allowing the indigenous communists to win. Others set up women’s clinics, radical bookshops and food co-ops, or moved into rural and urban communes. Such institutions “prefigured” those that radicals longed to build in the ashes of the evil system they aimed to destroy. But the jefe of Cuban communism and his bosom comrade Che Guevara had made their revolution with guns and bombs. And they were urging leftists around the world, in Guevara’s words, to “create two, three, many Vietnams”—wars against imperialism—before Bolivian troops captured and murdered the guerilla icon in 1967.
The young Americans who created the Weatherman organization during the summer of 1969 and took it underground less than a year later did not fret about whether the United States was actually ready for the “white fighting force” they vowed would answer Che’s call. “There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence,” Bernardine Dohrn declared, “in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created!” Beautiful, charismatic and audaciously self-confident, Dohrn was the primus inter pares of the several hundred radicals who broke up the 100,000-member Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the rush to emulate their Third World heroes and heroines.
Now her son Zayd Ayers Dohrn, aged 49, has published a captivating memoir about how Dohrn, his father Bill Ayers and their comrades in extreme politics struggled to launch a violent revolution—and utterly failed at the task. He leaves unmentioned the irony contained in the very origin of the group’s name: the lyric by Bob Dylan that snaps, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
The author does not dwell on that failure. A loyal and loving son, he instead describes in absorbing detail how his parents evolved from peaceful activists to bomb-building insurgents. Ayers, the son of a utility executive, ran a progressive children’s school in Ann Arbor, while Dohrn, a suburban kid from Wisconsin, used her legal training to advise men how to evade the draft. But hot anger over the persistence of racism at home and the genocidal conflict in Southeast Asia convinced them radicals had a moral obligation “to bring the war home.”
In brief chapters stuffed with telling anecdotes, Ayers Dohrn gives a vivid account of life on the wild side of politics during the 1970s, all of which his parents spent underground. Bill and Bernardine helped construct bombs that smashed wings of government buildings; they sent advance warnings and so injured nobody. Fellow Weatherpeople sprang LSD guru Timothy Leary from prison, while Bill and Bernardine, it transpires, played bit parts in Black revolutionary Assata Shakur’s jailbreak and escape to Cuba. Zayd himself is named after a leader of the Black Panther Party who died during a shoot-out with New Jersey state troopers in 1973. If any of this reminds you of a scene or two in One Battle After Another, the resemblance is not coincidental. Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which inspired the award-wining film, drew heavily on the history of the Weathermen.
Ayers Dohrn affectionately narrates how adept his mom and dad got at surviving on the lam. Taking a series of new names, they settled into neighborhoods and held down jobs that paid enough to splurge on treats and toys for the author, who turned four when their long, strange trip finally ended in 1980. During a stop along the highway to Chicago where Dohrn planned to surrender to the Feds, someone asked little Zayd why the family was heading to the metropolis by the lake. “For my mom to turn herself in,” replied the sweet-faced boy with long blond locks. “We made a deal. With the FBI. So I can go to school.” The life of urban guerillas had morphed into the suburban banal.
What makes the memoir enticing can also obscure the grimness of what Ayers and Dohrn had resolved to do with their lives and, for a few years, those of Zayd and his baby brother too. The Weathermen began as one faction inside the largest student movement in U.S. history. Everyone in SDS shared the same anti-racist and anti-war convictions, but few were determined to pursue them by violent means; even before going underground, Weatherman had begun to assume the self-aggrandizing dogmatism of a cult. When its members retreated into hiding, their constant need for disguise and deception ensured their isolation from the larger left, which was fragmenting into identitarian clusters. Ayers and Dohrn doubled down on their belief that they and another underground group, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party who styled themselves a “Liberation Army,” were the only remnants of radical virtue left in an otherwise accursed nation. In 1970, the Black writer Julius Lester observed, “American radicals are perhaps the first radicals anywhere who have sought to make a revolution in a country which they hate.” If Ayers and Dohrn read that line, they may have taken it as a compliment.
My views about the duo and about the Weatherman group in general come from personal experience, as well as from writing histories of the American left and of the 1960s. As a leader of the Harvard chapter of SDS, I met Bernardine before she organized Weatherman. In 1968, Bill and his then-lover Diana Oughton spent an afternoon at my house in Cambridge, where we spent hours talking about their school in Michigan and what it would take to end the war in Vietnam. In March of 1970, I was shocked to hear that Oughton and two other Weatherpeople had been blown to pieces inside a swanky Manhattan townhouse; an anti-personnel bomb one of them was making exploded prematurely. They were planning to set the device off during a dance at an Army base in New Jersey, where it might have slaughtered dozens of soldiers and their dates. It took several days before a crane uncovered “the headless body of a young woman, missing both hands and a foot and riddled with roofing nails.”
The summer before, at the age of 21, I had become a Weatherman myself, driven by rage at the unending carnage in Vietnam and sympathy with the Black Panthers. Far from building a movement capable of smashing the evil order, over the next seven weeks our Cambridge collective performed a series of actions designed, quite unintentionally, to turn off as many potential converts as possible. On the day Ho Chi Minh died, we accosted a group of white working-class teenagers in a Dorchester park, going on about the greatness of Vietnam’s revolutionary hero and looking for a fight. (Unsurprisingly, we lost.) On another occasion, we crashed a mixer at Boston University, which we blasted for promoting male chauvinism, and urged students to unseat the administrators who planned it. We also practiced karate at a local park and talked about acquiring firearms and learning how to build a bomb.
Not quite ready to risk my life for the revolution, I persuaded my comrades to expel me. As in most cults, our certainty in our righteousness was supposed to be so unshakeable that one could not leave the fold voluntarily; the collective had to cast one out as unfit to wage the battle to liberate the world. The day after I left, the group’s titular leader told me I was no better than a deserter from the Viet Cong, “and you know what the Viet Cong does to deserters.”
Getting kicked out did not immediately end my devotion to the cause. That October, during the Days of Rage—when about three hundred Weatherpeople rioted through the Chicago Loop—I wrote and distributed propaganda leaflets about the action to people in the streets of Boston. One of the headlines read: “Red Army Marches on Chicago.” Yet even then it struck me as absurd.
●
At a few points in his narrative, Ayers Dohrn sheds his reluctance to criticize what his parents and their comrades had wrought. He suggests that the Weathermen’s “war on the U.S. government” did nothing but create piles of rubble from bombings around the country. He also bewails how the “Revolution” ate “Its Children”—namely, his own parents. After the North Vietnamese army won the war in 1975, “the Underground had become rudderless, a resistance in search of something to resist.” Two years later, a faction of mostly young Weatherpeople discovered a brave new purpose—accusing Zayd’s parents of betraying “the fight to build armed struggle” by planning to return to political work aboveground. A self-appointed committee hounded Dohrn to confess she had been “part of the structure of women’s leadership which actually served male supremacy” and had “followed the classic path of white so-called revolutionaries who sold out the revolution.”
Expelled from what remained of the organization she led, Dohrn gave birth to Zayd and his brother Malik and stayed safe until she and Ayers decided to face the legal music. Its melodies turned out to be surprisingly agreeable. Dohrn pled guilty to a couple of misdemeanors and spent three years on probation. Due to the FBI’s unwarranted property searches and wiretaps, the government had dropped every other charge against them. Eight thousand miles across the Pacific, U.S. forces had massacred over a million people, but back home, one could still trust most judges to apply the law.
The once “dangerous” couple spent the next decades raising their children in Chicago and becoming respectable academics. Ayers taught education at the University of Illinois, while Dohrn was a law professor at Northwestern and ran a legal clinic for juveniles. Ayers Dohrn praises them for discovering “unexpected new ways to fuse their radical beliefs with their new focus on family.” He extols his mother, now suffering from Alzheimer’s, as “the most committed, fiercely determined person I’ve ever known … the fuel that kept us all moving forward.”
One cannot expect an admiring son to render the sort of judgment those who lack his loving, intimate knowledge can make. Still, he might have mentioned how long it took his parents to express in public any serious second thoughts about Weatherman’s ideas or tactics. A full two decades after surfacing from the underground, Ayers sat for an interview with the New York Times on the occasion of the publication of a memoir he wrote about his “Fugitive Days.” “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he told the reporter. “I feel we didn’t do enough.” The piece appeared on the first page of the Arts section on September 11, 2001—the same day a brazen act of terrorism changed world history. Two years later, Bernardine acknowledged to the San Francisco Chronicle that “Our rhetoric was way off the charts.” Yet she made no apology. Given “the extreme situation of that illegal, immoral war and the … incredible racist behavior at home,” she marveled at “how relatively restrained the opposition was. I think that’s remarkable.”
This statement reveals how introverted those years spent in hiding seem to have made her. Opponents of the Vietnam War engaged in a remarkable variety of large and effective tactics before Weatherman got started and during the first five of those wasted years underground. They organized huge protests in big cities and thousands of colleges and high schools, encouraged millions of young men to resist the draft, mounted campaigns to support GIs and Marines who refused to ship out to Indochina, and lobbied Congress to cut off funds for the conflict, which finally occurred in 1973. Together with the Black freedom movement, they also nurtured an oppositional culture from which radical feminism, left environmentalism and gay liberation emerged. Opting for violence instead would have divided the mass movement and made it easier for the state to justify denouncing and destroying it.
The members of Weatherman never appreciated the impossibility of making a revolution in a prosperous industrial nation with a flawed but functioning democracy. Ayers, Dohrn and company took inspiration from the theory of “focoismo” that Guevara used to explain the rapid victory in 1959 by the rebels who toppled Cuba’s corrupt dictator, Fulgencio Batista. By taking up arms against the forces of order, Che argued, a small, disciplined group of rebels—un foco, or focal point—can persuade a disgruntled, oppressed population to join in overthrowing the rotten system. But Guevara lost his life attempting to kickstart a revolution in Bolivia with a band of just fifty guerillas who did not even speak the native language of the people in the mountains where they were fighting.
The first duty of an aspiring revolutionary should be to make a sober analysis of the nation one hopes to lead. Failing that, no transformation of society will occur. Are the political and economic institutions failing to serve its citizens? Do most people sympathize with the radicals, and is there a sizeable cohort eager to join the fight? The Weathermen and women were not total idiots; they knew how greatly the mighty, ultra-modern United States differed from smaller, agrarian nations like Cuba and Vietnam. So they compared themselves to John Brown and Nat Turner, Americans who died in the struggle to abolish slavery, rather than to Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh. They ultimately demonstrated how foolish and self-destructive it was to preach and practice revolutionary armed struggle in a country whose voters had just elected Richard Nixon president and, polls showed, liked anti-war protesters even less than they wanted to keep battering the Vietnamese.
Through the lives of his parents, Zayd Ayers Dohrn has composed a tragic saga that should serve as a warning to anyone entranced by the simple vision of busting up America and starting over. Not that he sees it as I do: the memoir ends with a rather anodyne tribute to young people who “invent and reinvent themselves to match and move the spirit of their times; to imagine and reimagine a better future; and to grow up to be good revolutionaries.” It’s an echo of the final scene in One Battle After Another: the daughter of erstwhile rebels is leaving home to join a demonstration. “Be careful,” her father warns her. “I won’t,” she replies.
Those who work to bring about necessary, radical change cannot expect to avoid getting in trouble. But when they do, it ought to be at the service of building mass movements and compelling politicians to enact policies that will improve the lives of Americans in durable ways. Think of the suffragists in 1917 who chained themselves to the gates of the White House, the striking auto workers who occupied their factories during the Michigan winter of 1936-7, the teenagers in 1963 who braved police dogs and high-pressure water hoses in Birmingham, and the Minnesotans who recently protected their neighbors and coworkers from the clutches of ICE. All drew the fury of authorities, and some got thrown in jail—or died. But they expanded the popularity of their causes and placed their adversaries on the defensive. The most effective act Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers performed during their long decade underground was to avoid getting caught.
Most Americans who called for “revolution” during the era of the 1960s failed to grapple with the gulf between desire and opportunity. I am no admirer of Vladimir Lenin, but he understood what it took to topple a regime he despised and establish a strikingly new one in its place. A revolution only becomes possible, he wrote in 1915, when the ruling class cannot rule in “the old way,” the lower classes are so oppressed that they are unwilling to live in the old way, and “the masses” mobilize to seize state power. None of that occurred when Weatherman emerged, and American politics has only grown more conservative since.
To learn about the wasteful delusions of Weatherman from Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s eloquent memoir ought to convince leftists today to join and build large, nonviolent movements and to train progressives to construct broad coalitions that can win enough elections to seed a new political era. That is the path Michael Harrington, the socialist leader and intellectual who helped found DSA back in 1982, called “the left wing of the possible.” The Trumpian present is too replete with perils to chase impossible dreams.
“The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution.” Every New Leftist in the late 1960s was familiar with that axiom, attributed to Fidel Castro, and most took it to heart. Yet in a leaderless movement, there were numerous ways to comply. Some sought to advance the revolution with marches demanding the U.S. pull out of Indochina right away, allowing the indigenous communists to win. Others set up women’s clinics, radical bookshops and food co-ops, or moved into rural and urban communes. Such institutions “prefigured” those that radicals longed to build in the ashes of the evil system they aimed to destroy. But the jefe of Cuban communism and his bosom comrade Che Guevara had made their revolution with guns and bombs. And they were urging leftists around the world, in Guevara’s words, to “create two, three, many Vietnams”—wars against imperialism—before Bolivian troops captured and murdered the guerilla icon in 1967.
The young Americans who created the Weatherman organization during the summer of 1969 and took it underground less than a year later did not fret about whether the United States was actually ready for the “white fighting force” they vowed would answer Che’s call. “There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence,” Bernardine Dohrn declared, “in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created!” Beautiful, charismatic and audaciously self-confident, Dohrn was the primus inter pares of the several hundred radicals who broke up the 100,000-member Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the rush to emulate their Third World heroes and heroines.
Now her son Zayd Ayers Dohrn, aged 49, has published a captivating memoir about how Dohrn, his father Bill Ayers and their comrades in extreme politics struggled to launch a violent revolution—and utterly failed at the task. He leaves unmentioned the irony contained in the very origin of the group’s name: the lyric by Bob Dylan that snaps, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
The author does not dwell on that failure. A loyal and loving son, he instead describes in absorbing detail how his parents evolved from peaceful activists to bomb-building insurgents. Ayers, the son of a utility executive, ran a progressive children’s school in Ann Arbor, while Dohrn, a suburban kid from Wisconsin, used her legal training to advise men how to evade the draft. But hot anger over the persistence of racism at home and the genocidal conflict in Southeast Asia convinced them radicals had a moral obligation “to bring the war home.”
In brief chapters stuffed with telling anecdotes, Ayers Dohrn gives a vivid account of life on the wild side of politics during the 1970s, all of which his parents spent underground. Bill and Bernardine helped construct bombs that smashed wings of government buildings; they sent advance warnings and so injured nobody. Fellow Weatherpeople sprang LSD guru Timothy Leary from prison, while Bill and Bernardine, it transpires, played bit parts in Black revolutionary Assata Shakur’s jailbreak and escape to Cuba. Zayd himself is named after a leader of the Black Panther Party who died during a shoot-out with New Jersey state troopers in 1973. If any of this reminds you of a scene or two in One Battle After Another, the resemblance is not coincidental. Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which inspired the award-wining film, drew heavily on the history of the Weathermen.
Ayers Dohrn affectionately narrates how adept his mom and dad got at surviving on the lam. Taking a series of new names, they settled into neighborhoods and held down jobs that paid enough to splurge on treats and toys for the author, who turned four when their long, strange trip finally ended in 1980. During a stop along the highway to Chicago where Dohrn planned to surrender to the Feds, someone asked little Zayd why the family was heading to the metropolis by the lake. “For my mom to turn herself in,” replied the sweet-faced boy with long blond locks. “We made a deal. With the FBI. So I can go to school.” The life of urban guerillas had morphed into the suburban banal.
What makes the memoir enticing can also obscure the grimness of what Ayers and Dohrn had resolved to do with their lives and, for a few years, those of Zayd and his baby brother too. The Weathermen began as one faction inside the largest student movement in U.S. history. Everyone in SDS shared the same anti-racist and anti-war convictions, but few were determined to pursue them by violent means; even before going underground, Weatherman had begun to assume the self-aggrandizing dogmatism of a cult. When its members retreated into hiding, their constant need for disguise and deception ensured their isolation from the larger left, which was fragmenting into identitarian clusters. Ayers and Dohrn doubled down on their belief that they and another underground group, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party who styled themselves a “Liberation Army,” were the only remnants of radical virtue left in an otherwise accursed nation. In 1970, the Black writer Julius Lester observed, “American radicals are perhaps the first radicals anywhere who have sought to make a revolution in a country which they hate.” If Ayers and Dohrn read that line, they may have taken it as a compliment.
My views about the duo and about the Weatherman group in general come from personal experience, as well as from writing histories of the American left and of the 1960s. As a leader of the Harvard chapter of SDS, I met Bernardine before she organized Weatherman. In 1968, Bill and his then-lover Diana Oughton spent an afternoon at my house in Cambridge, where we spent hours talking about their school in Michigan and what it would take to end the war in Vietnam. In March of 1970, I was shocked to hear that Oughton and two other Weatherpeople had been blown to pieces inside a swanky Manhattan townhouse; an anti-personnel bomb one of them was making exploded prematurely. They were planning to set the device off during a dance at an Army base in New Jersey, where it might have slaughtered dozens of soldiers and their dates. It took several days before a crane uncovered “the headless body of a young woman, missing both hands and a foot and riddled with roofing nails.”
The summer before, at the age of 21, I had become a Weatherman myself, driven by rage at the unending carnage in Vietnam and sympathy with the Black Panthers. Far from building a movement capable of smashing the evil order, over the next seven weeks our Cambridge collective performed a series of actions designed, quite unintentionally, to turn off as many potential converts as possible. On the day Ho Chi Minh died, we accosted a group of white working-class teenagers in a Dorchester park, going on about the greatness of Vietnam’s revolutionary hero and looking for a fight. (Unsurprisingly, we lost.) On another occasion, we crashed a mixer at Boston University, which we blasted for promoting male chauvinism, and urged students to unseat the administrators who planned it. We also practiced karate at a local park and talked about acquiring firearms and learning how to build a bomb.
Not quite ready to risk my life for the revolution, I persuaded my comrades to expel me. As in most cults, our certainty in our righteousness was supposed to be so unshakeable that one could not leave the fold voluntarily; the collective had to cast one out as unfit to wage the battle to liberate the world. The day after I left, the group’s titular leader told me I was no better than a deserter from the Viet Cong, “and you know what the Viet Cong does to deserters.”
Getting kicked out did not immediately end my devotion to the cause. That October, during the Days of Rage—when about three hundred Weatherpeople rioted through the Chicago Loop—I wrote and distributed propaganda leaflets about the action to people in the streets of Boston. One of the headlines read: “Red Army Marches on Chicago.” Yet even then it struck me as absurd.
●
At a few points in his narrative, Ayers Dohrn sheds his reluctance to criticize what his parents and their comrades had wrought. He suggests that the Weathermen’s “war on the U.S. government” did nothing but create piles of rubble from bombings around the country. He also bewails how the “Revolution” ate “Its Children”—namely, his own parents. After the North Vietnamese army won the war in 1975, “the Underground had become rudderless, a resistance in search of something to resist.” Two years later, a faction of mostly young Weatherpeople discovered a brave new purpose—accusing Zayd’s parents of betraying “the fight to build armed struggle” by planning to return to political work aboveground. A self-appointed committee hounded Dohrn to confess she had been “part of the structure of women’s leadership which actually served male supremacy” and had “followed the classic path of white so-called revolutionaries who sold out the revolution.”
Expelled from what remained of the organization she led, Dohrn gave birth to Zayd and his brother Malik and stayed safe until she and Ayers decided to face the legal music. Its melodies turned out to be surprisingly agreeable. Dohrn pled guilty to a couple of misdemeanors and spent three years on probation. Due to the FBI’s unwarranted property searches and wiretaps, the government had dropped every other charge against them. Eight thousand miles across the Pacific, U.S. forces had massacred over a million people, but back home, one could still trust most judges to apply the law.
The once “dangerous” couple spent the next decades raising their children in Chicago and becoming respectable academics. Ayers taught education at the University of Illinois, while Dohrn was a law professor at Northwestern and ran a legal clinic for juveniles. Ayers Dohrn praises them for discovering “unexpected new ways to fuse their radical beliefs with their new focus on family.” He extols his mother, now suffering from Alzheimer’s, as “the most committed, fiercely determined person I’ve ever known … the fuel that kept us all moving forward.”
One cannot expect an admiring son to render the sort of judgment those who lack his loving, intimate knowledge can make. Still, he might have mentioned how long it took his parents to express in public any serious second thoughts about Weatherman’s ideas or tactics. A full two decades after surfacing from the underground, Ayers sat for an interview with the New York Times on the occasion of the publication of a memoir he wrote about his “Fugitive Days.” “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he told the reporter. “I feel we didn’t do enough.” The piece appeared on the first page of the Arts section on September 11, 2001—the same day a brazen act of terrorism changed world history. Two years later, Bernardine acknowledged to the San Francisco Chronicle that “Our rhetoric was way off the charts.” Yet she made no apology. Given “the extreme situation of that illegal, immoral war and the … incredible racist behavior at home,” she marveled at “how relatively restrained the opposition was. I think that’s remarkable.”
This statement reveals how introverted those years spent in hiding seem to have made her. Opponents of the Vietnam War engaged in a remarkable variety of large and effective tactics before Weatherman got started and during the first five of those wasted years underground. They organized huge protests in big cities and thousands of colleges and high schools, encouraged millions of young men to resist the draft, mounted campaigns to support GIs and Marines who refused to ship out to Indochina, and lobbied Congress to cut off funds for the conflict, which finally occurred in 1973. Together with the Black freedom movement, they also nurtured an oppositional culture from which radical feminism, left environmentalism and gay liberation emerged. Opting for violence instead would have divided the mass movement and made it easier for the state to justify denouncing and destroying it.
The members of Weatherman never appreciated the impossibility of making a revolution in a prosperous industrial nation with a flawed but functioning democracy. Ayers, Dohrn and company took inspiration from the theory of “focoismo” that Guevara used to explain the rapid victory in 1959 by the rebels who toppled Cuba’s corrupt dictator, Fulgencio Batista. By taking up arms against the forces of order, Che argued, a small, disciplined group of rebels—un foco, or focal point—can persuade a disgruntled, oppressed population to join in overthrowing the rotten system. But Guevara lost his life attempting to kickstart a revolution in Bolivia with a band of just fifty guerillas who did not even speak the native language of the people in the mountains where they were fighting.
The first duty of an aspiring revolutionary should be to make a sober analysis of the nation one hopes to lead. Failing that, no transformation of society will occur. Are the political and economic institutions failing to serve its citizens? Do most people sympathize with the radicals, and is there a sizeable cohort eager to join the fight? The Weathermen and women were not total idiots; they knew how greatly the mighty, ultra-modern United States differed from smaller, agrarian nations like Cuba and Vietnam. So they compared themselves to John Brown and Nat Turner, Americans who died in the struggle to abolish slavery, rather than to Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh. They ultimately demonstrated how foolish and self-destructive it was to preach and practice revolutionary armed struggle in a country whose voters had just elected Richard Nixon president and, polls showed, liked anti-war protesters even less than they wanted to keep battering the Vietnamese.
Through the lives of his parents, Zayd Ayers Dohrn has composed a tragic saga that should serve as a warning to anyone entranced by the simple vision of busting up America and starting over. Not that he sees it as I do: the memoir ends with a rather anodyne tribute to young people who “invent and reinvent themselves to match and move the spirit of their times; to imagine and reimagine a better future; and to grow up to be good revolutionaries.” It’s an echo of the final scene in One Battle After Another: the daughter of erstwhile rebels is leaving home to join a demonstration. “Be careful,” her father warns her. “I won’t,” she replies.
Those who work to bring about necessary, radical change cannot expect to avoid getting in trouble. But when they do, it ought to be at the service of building mass movements and compelling politicians to enact policies that will improve the lives of Americans in durable ways. Think of the suffragists in 1917 who chained themselves to the gates of the White House, the striking auto workers who occupied their factories during the Michigan winter of 1936-7, the teenagers in 1963 who braved police dogs and high-pressure water hoses in Birmingham, and the Minnesotans who recently protected their neighbors and coworkers from the clutches of ICE. All drew the fury of authorities, and some got thrown in jail—or died. But they expanded the popularity of their causes and placed their adversaries on the defensive. The most effective act Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers performed during their long decade underground was to avoid getting caught.
Most Americans who called for “revolution” during the era of the 1960s failed to grapple with the gulf between desire and opportunity. I am no admirer of Vladimir Lenin, but he understood what it took to topple a regime he despised and establish a strikingly new one in its place. A revolution only becomes possible, he wrote in 1915, when the ruling class cannot rule in “the old way,” the lower classes are so oppressed that they are unwilling to live in the old way, and “the masses” mobilize to seize state power. None of that occurred when Weatherman emerged, and American politics has only grown more conservative since.
To learn about the wasteful delusions of Weatherman from Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s eloquent memoir ought to convince leftists today to join and build large, nonviolent movements and to train progressives to construct broad coalitions that can win enough elections to seed a new political era. That is the path Michael Harrington, the socialist leader and intellectual who helped found DSA back in 1982, called “the left wing of the possible.” The Trumpian present is too replete with perils to chase impossible dreams.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.