This article by John Molloy first appeared in Unity, the weekly publication of the Irish Communist Party.
LAST week’s tributes to the actor and director Robert Redford, highlighted his lifelong discomfort within the Hollywood “star machine” and his desire to use his fame and wealth to encourage independent writers/filmmakers via his Sundance festival.
The timeline of his own career also represented an era when mass-produced art, even within such corporate shackles represented a reflection of the zeitgeist of the late sixties/early seventies’ broader expressions of social change and a counterculture critical of traditional authority.
One of Redford’s most famous roles was playing reporter Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men”, a cinematic re-telling of Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigative journalism for the Washington Post that helped to expose the role of the Nixon administration in the Watergate scandal.
Mainstream scripts of course tend to oversimplify and are particularly prone to overplay the role of a (usually male) individual “hero/antihero” – failing to capture the power dynamics and collective forces that shape the real, broader story.
Commendably, the real-life central protagonists in this journalistic triumph themselves were clear that they only played one part on Nixon’s fall. As the Washington Post’s publisher at the time commented decades later “the processes that caused Nixon’s resignation were constitutional” involving the range of “special prosecutors, federal judges, the FBI and Committees of both Houses of Congress and the Supreme Court.”
As ever, an individual head, even a President’s may roll, but the ugly truth of the US state is not reversed by such symbolic loss, indeed it fulfils the di Lampedusa’s quotation “for things to remain the same, everything must change“.
In this way, we can observe the then young staffers and corporate sponsors around the Nixon White House, still present decades later as veterans of both Bush administrations and now shoring up, despite the projection of difference that MAGA “Trumpism” is supposed to represent, the current Emperor’s lethal imposition of American imperial interest at home and abroad – most explicitly underwriting the Zionist genocide in Gaza.
Significantly, the permanent wars of US foreign policy continue to be accompanied by an increasingly aggressive attack on the sinews of democratic accountability at home, including the mildest expression of regime criticism/satire on advertising-dependent television networks.
This democratic deficit is not limited to the United States of course and given how much of the last few decades were delivered by the husks of Parties who still feigned “social democratic” principles – it begs the question of how the historic, mass attempt to transfer power and accountability from the “wallet to the ballot” traditionally delegated to them, is now pursued given that such engines of change have been captured, remain enfeebled and now, objectively position themselves in policy terms as “the moderate wing of fascism”.
Closer to home such questions of change and accountability highlight the issue of where the democratic “potential” of the Good Friday Agreement now sits in 2025. In other words, how much of this “potential” still exists and how much has been diluted over time to near meaninglessness in favour of a job creation scheme for party machines in perpetual self-sustaining election fighting mode?
Viewing this in the context of press “freedom” in our locale – among the many specific questions raised by the surveillance of journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey (and many more) is the broader one: how are the “new dispensation” post GFA arrangements on Policing and Justice responding to this scandal?
Similarly, beyond individual crises, is the question of what might constitute the next civil rights struggles for the island and how the fight for real accountability /democracy might contribute to the struggle for universal provision of health and social care, public housing and true, neutral, national independence.