Tom Hayden

Three years after quixotically losing his bid for a City Council seat, L.A.'s best-known liberal politician is out of the electoral politics game and, he says, happily so. The first act of Hayden's career was as an architect of '60s direct-action radicalism, author of the 1962 Port Huron Statement and co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society, and one of the Chicago Seven prosecuted for inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Famously married to then-radical actress Jane Fonda, with whom he has two grown children (the eldest, Troy Garrity, recently co-starred in Barbershop), Hayden then made a hard 180-degree turn straight into 18 years in the California Assembly in 1982 and Senate in 1992, where he represented the left-of-Left, to decidedly more modest effect. When he term-limited out of the State Senate in 2001, the L.A. Times said he received one of the longest and most tearful send-offs in the history of the legislature. It was as though the '60s dream had left the building. Now, act three: married to actress Barbara Williams and father to a new three-year-old, Liam, the author of nine books on environmentalism, political history, and being Irish keeps an office in Culver City, where he's finishing a new book on gangs and preparing for a fall seminar at Harvard. “Get this,” he chuckles about the seminar. “They think that I'm an excellent model to encourage students to go into politics.” – Dean Kuipers

CityBeat: No hunger for a U.S. Congress seat?

Tom Hayden: I wish that I'd been in Congress at some point. Especially now with Bush there. But I would have a really hard time getting elected because of my views. L.A. is very ethnic. Many of the Jewish voters would not support me because of my views on the Middle East. And in districts that are largely Latino or African American or Asian, they're not looking for a white candidate. Massachusetts or the San Francisco Bay Area would be the more natural setting.

It must be an abrupt change.

I don't think I'll ever fully get over losing the city council seat. I don't know how that happened. But it was less than 1 percent out of 50,000 votes. I'd put in six or seven years into changing L.A. I think there were 30 debates. And then not long afterwards, I had congestive heart failure. On the other hand, I could retire from politics before I started drooling. I had two hits on Sunday in my baseball game, and I've written a book on gangs, taught a course on gangs at Occidental. And for the first time in 20 years, I'm able to leave town.

Did the legislature teach you to compromise? Or did you feel you had to represent the radical edge?

Well, [California Assemblyman] Gil Cedillo [D – East L.A.] said that I was never judged on my legislative work, but I was judged on my baggage. But overall, I came to realize that what was expected of me by voters and colleagues was to fight the good fight. I put in work for my neighborhood. Hundreds of bills, measures, budget items, and hearings. I always tried to make it a point to stay late, to always run the longest hearings, to carry nearly the most bills. The tragedy was that of the 18 years I was in Sacramento, 16 years were under Republican governors. I had to work particularly hard to get Wilson and Deukmejian to sign my bills – which they did, almost as frequently as Gray Davis. But I wonder what it would have been like if it had been the early '70s and Jerry Brown had been governor.

Even today, few progressives want to get involved with party politics.

I'm not ready to give you a clear answer on whether electoral politics holds any particular hope for progressives. It would mean that nothing I did ever mattered. It would mean that we're the only advanced capitalist society in the world with a democratic structure that has no left party. But there is something seriously problematic about radicals and progressives in American politics. Some say it's the two-party system that squashes third parties. Some say that it's the potentiality or expanse of the middle class that marginalizes people that want to reform the system itself. Some make a sort of psychological analysis, that the left doesn't want to win, that success means co-optation. All of those things have some merit.

Protest politics has been vibrant against Bush and the war in Iraq, but it's been intergenerational. This doesn't seem to be a resurgence of student activism.

It's greater than ever, but it doesn't stick out as it did in the '60s and early '70s, because it's part of the anti-war movement and anti-globalization movement. But there's also plenty of student activism as a result of the '60s: the admission of larger numbers of students of color, particularly Latinos. The hunger strike at UCLA led to hundreds of students actually studying the farm worker experience and Chicanos in the context of Latin America, whereas they would have been on the outside raising fists and banners. So I count that as activism inside the classroom. There's also a lot going on with gender issues, gay-lesbian issues, issues that are categorized as more personal than political.

Let's talk about the gang book that you're writing.

It's tentatively called War and Peace: Street Gangs and the Future of Violence. It combines street narratives with a critique of the neo-conservative “war on gangs” that started under Reagan and expanded under Clinton. It describes the transformation in the lives of numerous gang members who were considered incorrigible, but became peacemakers – and discovered that society didn't want them anyway. My thesis is that the ones who started the madness have got to be included in ending it. The first chapter is called, “These Bodies Don't Count.” It's a long analysis of why there is no accurate national assessment of how many people have been killed in the gang wars since the '70s. I estimate a very conservative number of 25,000 dead homeboys. If 25,000 white people were killed in two decades of urban drive-bys, you could imagine there would be prime time television, there would be counseling, economic packages, truces would be negotiated by diplomats with experience in Northern Ireland or the Balkans. Nothing! So the assumption is that these are “lesser dead.”

You connect gangs, in part, to the Civil Rights era.

A lot of the book traces back to what happened in the late '60s. I've interviewed a lot of veteranos and OGs. Some of them were Vietnam vets – they came back with weapons training, and dishonorable discharges, and drug addictions. James Baldwin addressed it directly with The Fire Next Time. The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970. If you're progressive, you call it “uprisings,” if you are not progressive you call it “urban disorders” or “civil unrest.” But the Kerner Commission [1968 report by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, ordered by President Lyndon Johnson and headed by Otto Kerner], was quite good. I was surprised. They proposed massive job programs for black youths with criminal records. Nothing happened. Zero.

What do you think would be one of the solutions other than the “more police, more prisons” solution?

“More police, more prisons” has failed to prevent a quagmire that is growing like gangrene in the core inner cities. First, the peace and justice movement has to expand and not run away from the plight of gang members. Second: There has to be an inner peace process that treats gang members like traumatized war victims who lack counseling, jobs, and respect. A lot of that has got to be self-administered in affinity groups, counseling groups, in jail and out of jail, with resources and professional help. The third thing is to reverse the mad corporate faith in the market, which is literally a rationale for not employing these kids. The easiest example in your hometown here is “Rebuild L.A.,” which was supposed to create 50,000 jobs in five years, with $6 billion in private investment. They closed up in two years. If you look at the data, the inner city that was the riot zone lost 55,000 jobs in the ten years from 1992 to 2002, instead of gaining a surplus of 50,000. People can say that this is not deliberate, but from the street or gang members' perspective, they don't bog down in the fancy sociological arguments that no one is responsible.

Activists, in general, are afraid of gangs.

Yeah, but the same person who is afraid of the gang member tends to come down in favor of drug treatment rather than drug incarceration. So the law enforcement establishment has to keep generating fear. And their problem is two-fold. One is the cost: already this war on gangs in California is taking money from universities to build prisons, and the universities have some clout. Second, it's hard to ever claim “success.” If you claim “success,” then budget priorities might go the other way. If you claim that we still need more money because the danger is growing, other people start asking, “Well, how come your methods don't work?”

Getting back to electoral politics, can the Democrats knock off Bush in 2004?

I think that Bush can be beat, no doubt. He and Karl Rove are spinning their invincibility far beyond credibility. But I'm less sanguine about the Democratic Party's ability to compete without self-destruction. Because it is really divided. If they put up Lieberman, I can guarantee you that 5 percent of the party won't vote. Maybe more. But Howard Dean is sensing what I sense – that the Democratic Party rank and file is still very resistant to this pull to the right. They are not going there. The party leaders, instead of conspiring to knock-off Dean, should be conspiring about how to bring the Dean constituency back to the party. Because they are on their way to not voting – or to Nader.

Where did you come down on the whole Nader vs. Gore thing?

I thought that was a complete tragedy. I was for Gore. I thought that Gore and the Democrats were pretty clueless as to what Nader and the Greens represented, and they acted like bullies. Like, “How can we smash Nader and the Greens?” which only antagonized Nader and the Greens further. On the other hand Nader, I think, made a foolish argument that the two parties were the same.

Now, I know my friends on both sides don't wanna hear this. But the fact of the matter is: they are on their way to self-destruction. I guarantee you. Nader is running with Cynthia McKinney. He's gonna get 2 or 3 percent of the vote. And as we sit here now, I don't see any way for the Democrats to beat Bush while conceding Nader 3 percent of the vote. So it's something that the Republicans are just sitting back counting on as the key element to their strategy. It's like a project of the Republican Party: how to expand the Greens. And neither the Democrats nor the Greens have even appointed anybody to deal with this strategic question.

Maybe that's a good role for you, to be the guy saying, “We have to deal with this.”

There is no role in a war unless the parties are exhausted. These parties are not exhausted. They are still on a triumphal path. They are not on a coalition path. It's an either/or death struggle. They don't understand that the death is ongoing right now and could take several cycles for the corpse to be autopsied. I hope you use this – this should put your paper on the map. Everybody should read it.