“Bowl a strike, not a spare—Revolution everywhere!” Members of the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) chanted bowling-themed slogans as they marched against President Ronald Reagan’s threat to invade Nicaragua in 1988.
Acting within a broad progressive coalition, RABL helped shut down major sections of downtown Minneapolis for three days in an outpouring of rebellion against the Reagan administration’s covert wars in Central America. They built barricades in the streets and occupied major intersections in the business district. Events reached a dramatic climax when a masked protester threw a bowling ball through the window of a military recruitment office. The crash of the broken glass marked the beginning of a new era of anarchist militancy in the United States. The rage of a generation of young people raised in Reagan’s America threatened to explode.
Promised a “new morning in America,” a generation of disaffected young people found themselves shut out of political life and raised in the alienation of the suburbs. Many of their parents lost their unionized factory jobs to neoliberal outsourcing or were kicked off welfare. They grappled with the reality of skyrocketing inequality, precarious jobs, and violent policing. The hopes of social democracy—not to mention the liberatory movements of the 1960s-1970s—were dead, and mainstream society seemingly offered little worth saving.
Meanwhile, Reagan crushed the hopes of a better world in Central America by funding and training Guatemalan death squads, Nicaraguan Contras, and violent Salvadoran elites. The 1980s was the decade of the triumph of American capitalism against both the left-wing idealism of the 1960s at home and the “Evil Empire” of Soviet Communism abroad. The New Right remade American society in its image, spreading suburbia and waging war on what it called the liberal “nanny state.”
But dissidents emerged out of the cracks of the new society. A new generation growing up in Reagan’s America turned to anarchism. Young people found a new form of politics in mosh pits at punk shows and street fights against fascists and police. Anarchism provided a political home and a strategic program for rebels of the new generation.