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REBECCA SOLNIT WANTS A JOYOUS, INVITING LEFT — NOT AN ANGRY,
PURITANICAL ONE  
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Anand Giridharadas
April 4, 2024
The.Ink. [[link removed]]

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_ This first installment is about the fight for progress, what our
movements get right, what they get wrong, why they must learn to
celebrate their own victories and grow more inclusive, how we should
think and talk about America as a country _

Dance of Youth, Pablo Picasso

 

Rebecca Solnit is one of our preeminent thinkers about change. How we
make it, how we live with it, how people cope with despair at the lack
of it, where people locate hope that it may once again grow possible.
She is a writer and an activist and a philosopher — and, for so many
change makers, a beacon of evidence-based hope.

In this moment full of panic and despair, she was who I needed to talk
to. So I’m thrilled to bring you part one of an extraordinary
conversation we just had.

I wish neither to spoil it nor to boil it down, and I would ask that
you just trust me on this one. But this first installment is about the
fight for progress, what our movements get right, what they get wrong,
why they must learn to celebrate their own victories and grow more
inclusive, how we should think and talk about America as a country,
and so much more.

I sort of asked Rebecca to sort me out about a lot of the things I
have been struggling with myself these days. She didn’t disappoint.

Part one of this conversation runs today, the second part tomorrow.
And then, before long, we will be doing a thematically separate
conversation with her on the subjects of technology, artificial
intelligence, and more.

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I WANTED TO START WITH THE ELECTION, AND ASK YOU TO LOOK AT THE
POSITION OF THE BIDEN CAMPAIGN, THINKING ABOUT ALL OF YOUR WORK ON THE
RELATIONSHIP OF MOVEMENT TO ESTABLISHMENT POWER. I THINK BIDEN'S VERY
INTERESTING BECAUSE YOU COULD MAKE A CASE, A VERY _HOPE IN THE
DARK_ CASE, THAT HE WAS MOVED DRASTICALLY ON CLIMATE AND ON ECONOMICS
BY PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS. ON ISRAEL AND GAZA, IT’S FAIR TO SAY HE
HAS BEEN MUCH HARDER FOR MOVEMENTS TO MOVE.

HOW WOULD YOU REFLECT ON THE BIDEN PRESIDENCY AND CAMPAIGN AND ROLE IN
HISTORY, RELATIVE TO MOVEMENTS AND THIS IDEA OF PRESSURE?

One thing I have taken to saying a lot is that amnesia leads to
despair and it also leads to powerlessness. People don't trace the
trajectory of change. For example, you can look at marriage equality
as something the Supreme Court kindly handed down and see it as being
about power reposing in an elite minority.

Or you can see marriage equality as the outcome of both the feminist
demand that marriage be a freely negotiated relationship between
equals, which makes same-sex marriage more imaginable, and the bravery
of millions of queer people coming out of the closet telling their
friends and family, “This is who I am.”

So that the Supreme Court decides this is normal and acceptable
because normal and acceptable has become a radically different thing
by 2015. I’m leaving aside the question of what the Supreme Court is
now. 

And on the Biden campaign, I just saw, actually, the New York Times
Pitchbot [[link removed]] guy joking about Biden
being forced to adopt the Sunrise Movement's platform or something
like that. He usually pokes at the right; here he was trying to poke
at the left, and he actually did get this one right. 

You can look at the Inflation Reduction Act as something handed down
by the Senate, but there's a wonderful documentary film called To the
End [[link removed]] that traces the birth of the
Sunrise Movement, their launching of the Green New Deal, its
introduction in Congress by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in particular,
the way the Green New Deal really shapes Biden's climate platform,
which becomes Build Back Better, which becomes the Inflation Reduction
Act, in its sadly whittled-down version thanks to Joe Manchin.

The short-term version of the story is the Senate gives us something.
The long-term version is young people organizing, achieving something
remarkable over a four-year period of time. And I think that a lot of
American hopelessness, despair, cynicism, and defeatism is so tied to
the inability to trace the arc of change.

Share
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Martin Luther King famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is
long, but it bends towards justice.” I think it bends in a lot of
different directions, but to see it bend at all, you have to see
across broad swaths of time. And people aren't very good at doing that
right now. They tend to forget what happened last month, last year,
let alone what’s happened over 10 or 20 or 50 years.

IT FEELS LIKE — AND YOU'VE WRITTEN ABOUT THIS — THAT ACKNOWLEDGING
VICTORY IS JUST SOMETHING ALIEN TO THE PERSONALITIES OF SO MANY PEOPLE
WHO ARE OTHERWISE REALLY INCREDIBLE FIGHTERS FOR A BETTER FUTURE. WHAT
IS IT THAT MAKES SO MANY PEOPLE — PEOPLE WHO YOU AND I KNOW AND
ADMIRE — SO RELUCTANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE VICTORY, THE VICTORIES OF THEIR
OWN MOVEMENTS?

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
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Workers [[link removed]], 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.

And it's funny, because I often see a kind of moving-the-goalposts
thing where if I say something positive has happened, the response
will be, “Well, but what about this? We just won this victory, but
we need to also do that.” People will dilute the victory by pointing
to something that isn't a victory, that should be a victory.

It's very weird to me as a habit, and something I think more and more
is how people come into the left because they care about justice, they
care about the environment, they care about human rights, and a lot of
what happens to them is that they learn to model their behavior on the
behavior of people who are already there.

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