Rebecca Solnit speaks with Anand Giridharadas
It’s a feature of our minds that we remember the coincidences, the little serendipities, and quickly forget events in life that, but for a second here or there, might have radically altered our lives, Brian Klaas writes in “Fluke.”
We also too easily forget what’s accomplished and obsess over what’s not.
“One thing I have taken to saying a lot is that amnesia leads to despair and it also leads to powerlessness,” Rebecca Solnit tells Anand Giridharadas. “People don’t trace the trajectory of change.”
I find that a feature of some on the left, the humorless glass-half-empty set I sometimes refer to as left-wing fundamentalists.
At The Ink, Solnit traces some of the many accomplishments progressive organizers have won over the last decade or so on human rights and on climate. But they are quickly forgotten as we tackle issues yet unresolved.
“I think that a lot of American hopelessness, despair, cynicism, and defeatism is so tied to the inability to trace the arc of change,” Solnit says.
Girdharadas asks why that is:
I don’t fully understand it because I am all for celebrating them, but I do feel like there’s something deeply puritanical in the left and progressive movements that I also think is pretty wrongheaded. There’s a weird sense that somehow being grumpy and negative is a form of solidarity with the oppressed.
And then you go and look at actually oppressed people: the Zapatistas, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, people facing climate change head-on in the small Pacific Island nations, and they’re not grumpy and defeatist. And I don’t think anybody in a gulag, in a famine, feels like, “Someone is sitting on their nice sofa at home in the United States feeling grumpy and that’s very helpful.”
Also, there’s a whole equation between being serious and radical with being tough in a very masculine mode that doesn’t invite in a lot of good cheer and celebration. And there’s a kind of absolutist idea that doesn’t accept imperfect and interim victories, even though that’s probably all we’ll ever get because the total revolution, paradise on earth, is not in my view going to happen.
Solnit sees reflexive judgmentalism of imperfection among allies as self-defeating.
Giridharadas recalls that in certain evangelical churches, the best parking is reserved for first-timers. The irony is striking, he notes:
And I just thought, that’s what the right is often able to do. What may be happening inside the church may be incredibly intolerant and exclusionary and hateful, but there’s an openness, there’s an open invitation to join the exclusionary tribe. And I often feel like the left has the opposite dynamic: the program indoors is profoundly inclusionary, but the parking thing hasn’t quite been figured out.
That’s a callback to another The Ink conversation about the left’s failure to build community in red, rural America: “The left offers help but no love, and the right offers love but no help.“
There is a lot to love about this country that we celebrate too little while focused on its flaws, Solnit believes. Sure, its founding myths are false, its founding ideal of equality for all unrealized. But we’re getting there.
Solnit adds:
And it’s funny because I think another habit people fall into is thinking that if you say not everything is bad, you must be saying everything is good. Part of the anti-Americanism within the U.S. is based on forgetting that while the U.S. has done very bad things, and it’s true, it’s also done very good things.
But those often get lost in “uninformed all-or-nothing oversimplifications,” Solnit suggests. Like Robert Jay Lifton’s term “thought-terminating clichés” deployed to end conversation rather than stimulate inquiry.
So many of the problems that you’re bringing up I think are habits of thought, of all or nothing, oversimplification, short-term thinking, dismissiveness, purity politics, that reduce the ability to engage with the complexity that we’re given into something much more cartoonish, which may make people feel more confident, but at the cost of understanding and engaging with the reality out there.
Continuing the conversation, Solnit reflects on the white Protestant backlash to a diversifying America and how demagogues manipulate that to hold onto power. Stopping them is still possible. But she also makes a distinction between hope and optimism:
In closing, I’ll say for me, hope is always a sense of the possibilities and the commitment to them, which knows that the future is being determined in the present, versus optimism, which I always equate with pessimism, cynicism, and the rest, which essentially assumes that the outcome has already been determined and nothing is required of us.
We are in a fight for the future of this country and it’s extremely winnable, but we need people to commit to it, show up, and participate. Nothing’s going to happen automatically, but I do believe we’re the majority and that the job always has been — and this is contrary to what I see some people think about climate and other things — the job is not to convert our enemies. The job is to motivate our friends.
And that means getting people to understand that we don’t go into the voting booth to have a pure experience of self-affirmation by voting for our identical twin, because in a country of 300 million, you’re not going to be offered that very often, if ever. It means being strategic, keeping your eyes on the prize, understanding how we move towards our larger goals with all these forms of engagement, all these decisions, however imperfect they may seem individually.
As I’ve put it more crudely, this is politics. If you want a soul mate, try Match dot com. Or as Joe Biden often says, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.”
One alternative is leaving the country should Trump prevail in November. Giridharadas and Solnit count themselves among the stay-and-fight brigade. Being native-born, white, and living in California, Solnit sees no immediate danger to herself. She’s staying.
But I had an unnerving conversation Tuesday with a dual-citizen expat living in Spain. He tells me E.U. consulates are flooded with Americans’ requests for visas. They’re looking to leave the U.S. for sanctuary in Europe. But if Trump wins in November and pulls the U.S. out of NATO, my friend says, there will be no security there. Or anywhere else. The alliance will falter and Russia will look first to pick off the Baltics and then who knows. E.U. countries are upgrading their defense industries. Even his native Sweden that since the end of the Cold War has taken for granted their security and only now just joined NATO.
Better to kick Trump’s ass this fall, you think?
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