Just when you least expected it, large-scale multiracial movement politics explodes. The weakening of such politics under the bipartisan corporate-backed war on union labor, the New Deal and Great Society programs since the 1970s, created the conditions for Donald J. Trump’s rise to power, whose niece describes him as the most dangerous man on the planet.
Nothing changes until it does: when 25-plus million Americans marched together, people of all backgrounds rallying behind and besides black leaders, against the videotaped police lynching of George Floyd in late May. We still have yet to get our heads fully around this development, I think. In any case, that late May uprising did not fall from the sky.
Rather, the lethal police terror behind Floyd’s killing has a history that Hollywood, media and schools minimize or sidestep generally. Why? The ruling order rejects regular people demonstrating against power and wealth. This upsets the ruling narrative that rejects grassroots politics generally and sanctifies voting. Occasionally, though, Tinsel Town can surprise you, at least by dramatizing the political history that helped to destroy the New Left.
The militancy of the New Left and the armed state repression it sparked is the subject of “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” released recently on Netflix, a company whose fortune has climbed with the lockdown orders to slow the spread of COVID-19. Alan Sorkin, the film’s director and screenwriter, fleshes out the place and time of Chicago in 1968 as the machine politics there under Mayor Richard Daley and US under FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover readied for and did battle with protesters at the Democratic National Convention. Actual footage of the police riots against the protesters in the film resemble the repression against Black Lives Matter, worsened by armed vigilantes emboldened from Trump’s hate speech in 2020.
Yes, Sorkin seasons his film with a fictional flavoring. That is a fair criticism. However, in my view, his take on the whys and wherefores of that historic moment of dissent, revolution and counterrevolution, are worth your viewing time at just over two hours. I see Sorkin’s foregrounding of government surveillance against the antiwar and race justice protesters in Chicago as perhaps the strongest film element.
His unpacking of the police and FBI disruption of the Chicago dissenters has practical significance for today’s youth coming of age in the time of Trump, COVID-19 and climate disruption. Sorkin helps viewers to see the breadth, depth of government undercover efforts to wreck the movement of protesters. They came to the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968 as the Vietnam War raged, and the military draft radicalized youth opposed to fighting in Southeast Asia.
Testimony of female and male undercover cops against the defendants at the trial drives this point home. In a way, the matter-of-fact manner in which the authorities testify is a revelation.
Is there a continuity between movement politics, such as Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Socialists of America, now to groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society and Black Panthers in 1968? Well, to ask the question is to answer it. Uncle Sam has two preferred ways of quelling dissent: cooptation and repression.
Think of the Edward Snowden revelations on government spying against the American people. A government contractor, he paid a heavy price for sharing his firsthand insights of the government’s illegal policies.
Check out “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” I think that you will be glad of that decision.
Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2020
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