A More Perfect Union

Tom Hayden On Democracy And Redemption

In his forty-year career as a social-justice activist, Tom Hayden has served jail time, and he has served as a California state senator. Arrested in 1968 for “inciting a riot” outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he returned to that city sixteen years later as a delegate to the convention. On a given weekend Hayden might spend one day participating in a street demonstration and the next addressing a roomful of elected officials.

In the sixties and seventies Hayden was active in the civil-rights and antiwar movements. He was a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society and principal author of the landmark Port Huron Statement, which called for a radical shift toward participatory democracy, granting citizens a more direct hand in governance. As a “freedom rider,” he rode buses in the South to protest segregation and racism. He was also a vocal critic of the Vietnam War, flying on several occasions to Cambodia and North Vietnam to assess avenues for a peaceful solution to the conflict. After his 1968 arrest outside the Democratic National Convention, Hayden was tried on conspiracy charges alongside seven other activists. Known as the “Chicago Eight,” the defendants became a symbol of sixties student protest. All were exonerated.

In the 1980s Hayden’s activism took a new trajectory. With the election of Ronald Reagan as president and the ascendancy of the Republican Party, Hayden decided to try his hand at state politics. His election to the California State Assembly in 1982 so upset Republican representatives that they twice tried unsuccessfully to block his seating, citing his long-ago trips to North Vietnam. Hayden went on to serve five consecutive terms as a California assemblyman and two terms as a California state senator. In those eighteen years Hayden ushered through cutting-edge legislation on the environment, education, prison reform, women’s issues, and campaign-finance reform. At the end of his second and final term as senator, the Los Angeles Times reported, Hayden received the longest farewell ovation of any legislator in memory.

Since then Hayden has focused on writing and teaching. To date he has authored eleven books on subjects ranging from environmentalism, to gangs, to his own Irish American heritage. Rebel (Red Hen Press), his memoir of his experiences in the sixties, is widely used in high-school and college classrooms. Hayden is currently a visiting professor at the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and also serves as a social-studies counselor at several inner-city public high schools.

Though retired from state politics, Hayden remains a bellwether of the social-justice movement; to find where the “edge” is, look to what Hayden is talking about. These days he serves as national codirector of No More Sweatshops, which urges the government to hold corporations accountable for their labor practices. He also speaks out against the global agenda of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and works with former gang members to reduce street violence.

Hayden lives in Los Angeles with his wife, singer and actress Barbara Williams, and their four-year-old son, Liam. He also has two adult children from a previous marriage to actress Jane Fonda. When we met for this interview some months ago, Hayden invited me to his modest canyon home, where we talked in his office for most of a Sunday afternoon. On several occasions Liam poked his head into the office looking for his father, who stopped the interview to play with his son. After each break Hayden picked up exactly where we’d left off, the conversation still fresh in his mind.

McKee: It’s been forty years since the Port Huron Statement called for a more participatory democracy. Is our society today more or less democratic than it was then?

Hayden: U.S. history as a whole is an ongoing struggle between growing participatory democracy, on the one hand, and the attempts of the corporate state to absorb and contain that democracy, on the other. Over the past 250 years, the corporate state has had to contend with Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the women’s-suffrage movement, the abolition of slavery and the Negro-suffrage movement, the labor movement, the social upheaval of the 1960s, and the environmental movement. Ultimately the corporate state absorbs and accepts these movements (though it might take a hundred years) while trying to limit their effect on capitalism and elite rule.

So we have greater participation in the democratic process than we did forty years ago, or a hundred years ago, yet the elites are ever more intent on escaping its constrictions. For example, after the Vietnam War, there was a widespread desire to rein in, if not do away with, the CIA — certainly, to stop the intelligence services from assassinating foreign leaders. And there was an attempt to bring the presidency under control through, among other things, the passage of the Freedom of Information Act, which requires the disclosure of some secrets that presidents like to keep in the name of “national security.”

These were all significant accomplishments, providing greater protections than exist in many other countries, including the United Kingdom. But secrecy has taken up another address since then. Elements of the CIA now seem to be secret unto themselves, and the Pentagon has developed its own intelligence network and spying capacity. I think of these powerful elites as being on the run; others think that they’re wielding more power over us than ever. Whatever the case, I think we have to fight all the time to keep participatory democracy the norm.

A Good Deal. A Great Gift. Give The Sun as a holiday gift and save up to 30%.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

PDF

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE