You don't need a weatherman...

One of the annoying things about Sarah Palin's (among others) injection of Bill Ayers into the campaign ("pallin' around with terrorists) last year was in fact, Ayers himself. A spectacularly arrogant human being who, if Deborah Soloman's (notoriously unreliable) "interview" is any guide, still not only fails to see the moral risk of blowing shit up, he fails to see the damage the Weathermen's actions did to the anti-war movement as a whole.

How did you feel when Obama publicly disowned you, describing you as a guy in his neighborhood who had committed “despicable acts” when he was 8 years old?
That is not a minority position. I know a lot of people who feel that way, even people on the left.

Right, the Weathermen, which you co-founded, did hurt the antiwar movement by adopting violent tactics and alienating the middle class.
I don’t think that what we did was brilliant. Frankly, I don’t think what anybody did was brilliant.

Do you regret your involvement in setting off explosions in the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol?
Anyone who thinks what we did is despicable should look at the fact that the U.S. government killed three million people in Indochina between 1965 and 1975. That’s really despicable.

So via Yglesias, this brief memoir of the movement, by a fellow WU member, is a refreshing tonic.

By allowing our frustration and revolutionary airs to trump our political common sense, we disowned one of the ’60s-era organizers’ greatest contributions to leftist politics—the revival of what has been termed the “organizing tradition.” This was the tradition, focused on long-term change and bottom-up politics that animated the Civil Rights, Black Freedom, Women’s Liberation and antiwar movements.

This organizing tradition, which the WU abandoned, has a developmental, long-haul perspective and an emphasis on building relationships that endure. It respects collective leadership and holds that the best movement leaders should have ongoing, accountable relations with their bases—the grassroots. Its anti-bureaucratic ethos and preference for connecting issues and organizing around peoples’ everyday lives create an expansive notion of democracy.

This conception of organizing goes beyond mobilizing, disdains vanguardism, requires patience and emphasizes the centrality of building new leadership. The organizing tradition was most fully embodied in the practice of early Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers, but also revivified in Women’s Liberation groups and even some SDS chapters.

Out of sheer impatience and an inflated sense of vanguardism, the WU rejected this empowering tradition. Ironically, the WU understood the painstaking work of grassroots organizing as a sign of white privilege. This work required waiting too long while the world was in tumult.

The WU favored more dramatic action that ended up disconnecting the purported leadership from any mass base, leaving it unaccountable (except self-glorifyingly to a nebulous “people of the world”) in its self-defined trajectory. The WU rationalized its practice by attacking any possible base as too privileged, too corrupted by consumerism and imperialism.

Of course, it's easy to look back now and condemn them for their impatience. Yes, the war was raging and would continue for several more years, but the trajectory had changed...Nixon ran as a "peace candidate, after all." Still, the frustration must have been intense, not unlike recent years as the war in Iraq continues against the wishes of the American people. But what the WU and other groups espousing violence did was lend legitimacy to violence and government surveillance against anti-war organizers and to help, along with the non-violent Yippies, fracture the movement. And that's what frustrates me about Bill Ayers and Sarah Palin's successful effort to enshrine him -- he refuses to admit he may just have been wrong. Unlike Ayers, Howard Machtinger grew up.