Bill Ayers believes opposition to Trump should come from the people—not the Democratic Party
The author and former Weatherman says modern revolutionaries also don't have to look to the 1960s for inspiration.
Bill Ayers
ere'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.
But for the 72-year-old activist and retired professor, there's a silver lining to Trump's ascension: the radical ideas in Ayers's pro-revolution manifesto now seem, well, less impossible. "If Secretary Clinton had taken the presidency, it would have been normal. And normal's not good enough," Ayers said in a recent interview. "I'm horrified by the election, but also I think that it's demanded of us to rethink what's going on in this country."
Ayers is no stranger to resistance and rebellion. He openly called for it at the dawn of Richard Nixon's administration nearly five decades ago as a cofounder of an organization of young activists called the Weathermen. The group's opposition to the Vietnam war and American imperialism escalated in 1969 with the Days of Rage, a raucous four-day protest and violent clash with Chicago police in the streets of Lincoln Park that led to 70 arrests and two dozen injured Weathermen.
In 1970, a homemade bomb that the Weathermen were assembling to detonate at the Fort Dix U.S. military base in New Jersey prematurely exploded in a Greenwich Village townhouse, killing three of the group's members. Prompted by that incident, as well as federal charges against two Weathermen, Ayers and his fellow fugitives—including his co-conspirator and now wife, Bernardine Dohrn—went underground. In the early 70s, the Weather Underground took credit for a campaign of bombings that targeted symbolic governmental targets ranging from Chicago Police Department squad cars to military bases to the U.S. Capitol Building and the Pentagon. ("Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon," wrote Ayers in his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days. "The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.")
The storm calmed for the Weather Underground as the draft and the Bill Ayers believes opposition to Trump should come from the people—not the Democratic Party | Politics | Chicago Reader:
