Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Chicago, Northwestern and the Politics of the New LeftSorry

        Sorry for the long title but I had to get it all out there.  This post is an ambitious one, especially for my second posting.  Yet, as ambitious as I might be, seeing fit to attack Chicago giants Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, it is something that I feel is necessary to do.  The people of the “New Left” movements during the 1960′s and 1970′s continue to encompass the politics of the radical left today.  Ayers and Dohrn are seen as progressive, radical, but acceptable, yet strangely, a fellow “New Lefter” Bob Avakian is seen as, well, an idiot.   Personally, they all should be just lumped together as merely misguided, but attempting to show them their faults would most likely be pointless, as much as it would be against my own philosophy and advice as well ( I am after all a member of the libertarian right ).   

      Without placing much emphasis, though I could, on the violent history and militant beliefs of Ayers and Dohrn, another reason why their way of thinking must be intellectually condemned, though I feel they have a right to it, however misguided.   A visit to Ayers’s blog (billayers.wordpress.com) is all the illustration that one needs, not to mention his countless comments about involvement with the Weathermen.  Ayers is ambivalent to his violent tendencies, living in a dreamy denial that what he attempted to achieve in the 1960′s was not terrorism.  I would state that their is actually little that separates Ayers from Timothy McVeigh.  While both men’s beliefs and actions are considered reprehensible, as they should be, and their activities should be condemned as acts of terrorism, the domestic nature of such activities does lend itself to a revolutionary trend,  but in both cases unnecessary and misguided.  McVeigh was dillusional, paranoid, and out of touch entirely with reality and the non-violent means to achieve his goals, i.e. political activism through demonstration and protest.  Ayers, while sharing McVeigh’s acceptance of violent response against what both men saw as an evil government, sought not to free all people’s from governments leash but to reduce the human existence to little more than a cog in the collective of socialist revolution.  Such ideologically flawed movements, such as Ayers was form the onset doomed to failure because of the autocratic nature of the ideology itself: a sort of freedom through submission to each other or as Ayn Rand described it, a life in which everyone is a slave to everyone.   

       The tragedy in all this is that Ayers was never able to actually implement his violent plans, the bomb prematurely detonated, killing three of his “comrades” while McVeigh  succeeded, taking innocent lives with a needless act.   I ponder, if McVeigh had failed and perhaps had gone on to get a PhD would he perhaps be teaching at Oklahoma University, or a writer for the Mises Institute, or even a “friend” of Senator John McCain?  Ayers failed, he became a professor at UIC, the founder of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and a “friend”, though both men deny it, of Senator Barack Obama.   His wife, Bernardine Dohrn, is a professor at Northwestern University’s Law School, and she too was involved with Ayers and the radical/violent politics of the “New Left”.  

      Dohrn, while perhaps not as radical as Ayers, exhibits a far more paranoid politic.  In a 2003 article in “Monthly Review” Dohrn asserts that the radical right has been the powers to be since 1964 and evidently that imperialism has been the long term goal of the far-right and neoconservatives (http://www.monthlyreview.org/0703dohrn.htm).   1964, rather than being the rise of neocons or reactionary Republicans, was rather a coup by small government conservatives and libertarians, with the nomination of Senator Goldwater for president.   Perhaps, Dohrn’s, paranoia could be better grounded with the 1968 election and the rise of Richard Nixon, but even then, it is a stretch.  

     The lunacy of such people of the “New Left”, albeit some saw the light like David Horowitz  (note: I do not particularly agree with Horowitz, in fact I believe he and many of the modern neocons starting with Irving Kristol still have sympathies with Trotskyist dogma),  has remained to this day a gray area of classification.   People like Ayers and Dohrn who have for the most part given up the violent activism and become “intellectuals” are, as I noted above, acceptable as members of society, yet those like Bob Avakian, leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, who cannot let go of a dead ideology are seen as fringe, as “nut jobs” and are rejected by society.   Why haven’t those of the “New Left” those who instigated the hateful doctrines of collectivism, those like Ayers, Dohrn, Angela Davis, and many more been ostracized in the same manner.  They have not repented their violent behavior, they are ambivalent, they rather have continued through other channels to push their intolerant, violent, and ultimately hateful political doctrines, claiming a high moral authority as “intellectuals”.

The Tragic Death of Freedom of Speech

               It is a strange thing to watch the languid death of free speech in the United States.  It would seem obvious to any observer that free speech would die via government coercion, primarily by one ruling party or regime, this however is not the case.   The epitaph on our right to free speech shall simply state that it went out slowly, painfully, and with a whimper.   There is both a partisan and bi-partisan consensus when it comes to killing this supposedly in-alienable right, Republicans have their Patriot Act and Bong Hits for Jesus, and the Democrats have their Fairness Doctrine and unofficial capacity as the PC Police.  

            As woebegone as the bi-partisan assault on the Bill of Rights in total has been, nothing can be more deplorable than the recent shift in the publics own ambitions when it comes to shredding those first ten and most important constitutional amendments, especially that critical first one.   A recent Rasmussen poll shows that 47%, that is right, nearly half, of voting Americans, support the Fairness Doctrine it’s less than constitutional aims on our radio air waves.   Congressional Democrats see these numbers as a mandate; they see themselves as legislating popular opinion, unlike their Republican colleagues and their unpopular Patriot Act.  

            Herein lies the greatest of constitutional and in the end philosophical and moral questions, to what extent should government be populist based?  Should our government truly be bent to the will of the people, are the people truly sovereign?   Or, are the American people bound by a contract, one in which they are sovereign over many issues except those endowed to humanity as a whole, our in-alienable rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights?   To say yes to the former is to submit to a collective identity, to mold a society as Ayn Rand stated, “…were everyone is a slave to everyone.”   The latter, is to continue to stand for what our Founder’s began, the great democratic experiment.  In essence, one path leads to despotism of the majority, the other leads to the maximum liberty a society can attain.  

            If we as a people submit ourselves to the majority, if we do not stand against the current of popular opinion, then what is to stop horrendous and monstrous acts to be committed if the majority sees fit.   What if one day there are a majority of Americans who wish to re-implement slavery, or decide to pursue acts of genocide, or decide to in one way or another commit acts of blatant bias against one group or another ( not to say the latter does not in some instances happen now)?   To submit to popular opinion against the fundamental principles of our constitution is only to set course down a road that will inevitably lead to fascism, despotism, and the end of freedom.