There’s a reason why Donald Trump is barely mentioned in Bill Ayers’s new book, Demand the Impossible!: A Radical Manifesto, which calls for a social movement that opposes the neoliberal agenda of the rich and powerful that run our political system. When he was writing it last year, he generally assumed that Hillary Clinton would become the next president of the United States.
The storm calmed for the Weather Underground as the draft and the Vietnam War ended. By the time Ayers and Dohrn stopped using fake identities and came out of hiding in 1980 to turn themselves in, the group had been dormant for several years. It didn’t take long for the pair to be freed; nearly all charges against the Weather Underground were dropped due to illegal wiretaps and other misconduct by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
But the catastrophe we’re facing has accelerated in qualitative ways. Take public education. Both political parties, the mainstream media, the foundations, big money—they’ve all been pushing an agenda of corporate school reform for 30 or 40 years, but parents and communities have resisted because we want a public education system. With the appointment of Betsy DeVos and her intention of creating a $2 billion voucher strategy, however, the catastrophe facing public schools has intensified qualitatively. I think the Democratic Party is in a poor position to represent an opposition to that because they have colluded and coauthored the catastrophe that we’re in. I think we have an opposition to DeVos, but I don’t think we can look to the Democratic Party longingly and wonder if they will represent an opposition—they probably won’t.
There have been a lot of parallels drawn between Nixon and Trump. Do you see some of those same parallels?
I do think the tradition of radical politics in this country, of progressive and revolutionary politics, is certainly something to draw on. But I also don’t think that we’re living in the 60s and I don’t think that we should be looking nostalgically to the past. Black Lives Matter is the latest iteration in a centuries-old struggle toward black freedom. I see these very sophisticated young people in the streets confronting power even though they’re being attacked from every angle by power. They continue to have a very clear vision of what it means to solve the racial divide in a place like Chicago and create a just and decent and peaceful society. They continue to have a very clear vision of what it means in a place like Chicago to solve the racial divide and create a just and decent and peaceful society.
