March 12, 2010:
My friend was a music student at UC Berkeley when Governor Reagan attacked the campus on May 15, 1969.
The event was an atrocity. Riot police sealed all exits, allowing no-one to leave. In the news footage you can see them pushing crowds onto the campus, herding them into Sproul Plaza and other open spaces where they're unable to take shelter and not allowed to escape. An entirely hypocritical announcement was made requesting people to leave, which police deliberately made impossible. Military helicopters flew low, spraying teargas over the trapped crowds. National Guard advanced with fixed bayonets while thousands ran in panic seeking shelter in classrooms, labs, and basements. Every person on the campus that day was gassed: demonstrators, professors, staff, even wholly unpolitical students like my musician friend, who emerged vomiting from a soundproofed practice room where he'd had no idea what was going on.
Thousands were radicalized. These are the people, this is the state, this is the relationship. Reagan's message was that there was no space for neutrality; accepting that message, the movement surged, grew massive, and evolved in an increasingly revolutionary direction.
To my knowledge, this history was never recounted by Reagan's Democratic Party electoral opponents, who allowed him in the 1980s to reinvent himself as good-natured smiling Presidential grandpa Ron. By granting him such breathtaking immunity from his own past they contributed enormously to the ersatz moral authority which still widely surrounds him today: one of the key enablers of the dominance of finance capital which has defined the world since the 1980 election.
I draw two conclusions from this history. First, as we already knew, Democrats don't fight. Second, the Reagan/Thatcher project of restructuring economy and state under the dominance of finance capital had widespread support throughout the capitalist elite as a whole. The DP chose not to fight because by and large they agreed.
Unlike so many, my friend was not politicized that day. In despair for his country he fled to Spain, where he lived with Gypsies, mastered flamenco, and practiced principled nonviolence to the end of his life.