by Madelyn May

The sixties return to us now like half-remembered hymns—threadbare denim, acoustic protest, faces caught in silver nitrate and taped to dormitory walls like relics. Like everything, it’s a costume now, a myth. We don’t remember the weight.

What defined the era, however, was not its tie-dye. It lived in cost. Activism was not an accessory but a wager. Imprisonment, exile, state surveillance, death. The metallic taste of fear. Some gambles accelerated change. Others totally backfired, hardening opposition, and justifying repression.

I’m sure there was fashionable activism then, too, the kind that played well in those 60s era conversation pits. But what lingers, low in the archival photographs, is the sense that people gave more and lost more.

This question formed the core of my conversation with Bill Ayers, a former Weather Underground member who remains convinced that the United States is an empire sustained by organized violence.

“We are a military behemoth with no moral anchor,” he told me. “And that combination is particularly dangerous.”

The Weather Underground was a left-wing militant organization that carried out a series of high-profile bombings in protest of racial injustice and the Vietnam War. Their turn to militancy was not born in a vacuum but in a pressure chamber. And what it suggests and perhaps teaches us, unsettlingly, is that the violence we are witnessing now is not an aberration, not a sudden fracture in an otherwise working machine, but a recognition. An awakening to conditions too long normalized and reforms too long exhausted.

Still, it is very difficult in the modern day to talk or write plainly about violence. Everyday, we say it’s tragic and senseless, but continue to insist that it’s fringe, as though it were a stain rather than the fabric.

But violence is not incidental to the American story; it is one of its organizing principles. What was the American Revolution if not violence that history has deemed as a justified response to British cruelty?

Frantz Fanon wrote that “at the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon isn’t advocating gratuitous bloodshed. He’s diagnosing that in a society built on structural violence, the demand for nonviolence from the oppressed is not moral. It’s strategic for the oppressor. When violence is the foundation of order, resistance must be violent to be meaningful.

And yet—we live inside an economy of images where nuance is flattened and activism becomes content. It’s less a challenge to power than a reflection of personal virtue.

How are you using your platform?

Have you made it clear to your followers that you oppose genocide?

In this environment, any act intended to rupture the system is instantly aestheticized, moralized, condemned, or commodified, often all at once. The question is no longer simply What does this act mean? but whether meaning can survive the circulation at all.

So protest becomes sanitized, branded, performative. It loses its edge and with it, any capacity to meaningfully wound the systems it names. The result is not transformation but something more dangerous: eruptions without coherence, rebellions that mirror the violence they oppose without reshaping it.

I’ll call it, deliberately, Old Revolution—a ghost language.

Ayers is often treated as either relic or warning sign. He quietly transitioned in the late ’80s from one of America’s Most Wanted to a respected professor of education. But, depending on who you ask, he is either a symbol of revolutionary fervor or a mild-mannered academic with an FBI file. Mr. Keating with a pipe bomb.

Today Ayers, for his part, resists nostalgia. He does not romanticize the past, nor does he fully absolve it. He warns, instead, against the ease of performance. He is especially critical of liberal cultures that mistake visibility and spectacle for action. He distrusts the word “ally,” hears it like a faint echo of charity, prefers “solidarity,” a word he gives weight, one that gives risk.

He has always understood something uncomfortable: privilege anesthetizes. It allows those insulated from state violence to imagine themselves as external to it. But a diffusion of responsibility does not constitute innocence. Our empire’s violence may be bureaucratized and outsourced, but it is still painfully ours. It was with this mindset that Ayers and his future wife, Bernadine Dohrn, who was lounging on a couch overlooking the Chicago skyline during my conversation with Ayers, set out to form the group.

And yet there are fractures in his own narrative. The Weather Underground was largely composed of white youth who enacted violence while remaining mostly unscathed by the very institutions that produced them, unlike the Black Panthers, who were systematically hunted, imprisoned, and killed by the state. The asymmetry lingers: he resists viewing his own past actions as spectacle, yet hesitates to fully confront what those actions meant, whom they protected, and whether they ultimately accomplished anything at all. Ultimately, it asks difficult questions about who enacts violence, who absorbs it, and who is allowed to walk away.

Violence, after all, has always been susceptible to myth. In the modern era, the idea that capitalism can absorb everything, even our rage, gives rise to a seductive conclusion: that rage must make itself illegible.

History offers no pure examples of “legible” violence. The same tactics can serve liberation or oppression, depending on content, context, and direction.

Ayers knows this. The Weather Underground bombed the US Capitol in 1971 to protest the US invasion of Laos. During our conversation, I asked him about January 6. It is, perhaps, the hardest question I asked him. The parallel—however uneasy—hung between us.

The uncomfortable recognition that, at least superficially, there are echoes between past and present, between leftist insurrections and right-wing ones.

“Content matters. It’s not violence or nonviolence, it’s what the violence is for. The fascists on January 6 were fighting to preserve white supremacy.” To him, the distinction is absolute. The insurrectionists of January 6 sought to preserve a racial order; their violence was reactionary, not revolutionary.

And yet, there is a shared grammar there. An understanding that violence is not only force but symbol. Claiming, as many Capital stormers did, that their actions were in line with the founding rupture of the American experiment, even in distorted form, is a powerful gesture. It invokes legitimacy, ancestry, and destiny. It says: this violence belongs to us.

They were wrong, and simply sought to reinforce the very power structures they claimed to oppose, but they understood the language.

It is here that I begin to think of how movements calcify. How their capitalized iconography can be repurposed, distorted. In a 2002 documentary about the Weather Underground, I saw footage of someone at the Days of Rage waving the Gadsden flag: the yellow banner with the coiled rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me.”

Today, it’s an emblem of the American right, its libertarian roots twisted into a symbol of reactionary nationalism. “I didn’t see that,” Ayers said, bemused. “But I wouldn’t be surprised. Symbols shift. You breathe meaning into them.”

Old Revolution exists in its illegibility. It doesn’t sort its martyrs from its madmen with any reliable clarity. It insists only that we look, honestly, fearlessly, and unsentimentally at what this country produces.

Old Revolution asks whether politeness is ethical in the face of governmental oppression. Whether “civil discourse” can liberate people, regardless of political party, trapped inside systems designed to erase them.

It offers no clean arc, no promised redemption. It refuses only one thing: the lie that violence is foreign to the American narrative. It is not. It is inheritance.

And so we are left with the harder task: not to mythologize that inheritance, nor to disavow it for the sake of comfort, but to confront it. To ask what forms of resistance produce change rather than spectacle. To decide, quietly and without performance, whether we are willing to risk anything real, or whether we will continue to curate dissent that offends no one who matters and flattens everything into content.

What comes next will not be clean. But it may finally be honest. God forbid, it ends up a photograph in a dorm room.

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