From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Authoritarians Like Trump Love Fear, Defeatism, Surrender. Do Not Give Them What They Want
Date November 15, 2024 1:05 AM
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AUTHORITARIANS LIKE TRUMP LOVE FEAR, DEFEATISM, SURRENDER. DO NOT
GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT  
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Rebecca Solnit
November 9, 2024
The Guardian
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_ We must lay up our supplies – of love, care, trust, community and
resolve – so we may resist the storm. No one can deal with every
issue at once, and choosing which part of the problem to commit to is
part of the work of resistance. _

Dejected attenders at Kamala Harris’s election-night rally at
Howard University in Washington DC. , Photograph: Kevin Mohatt/Reuters
// The Guardian

 

Here we are in a crisis in which almost everything we love is going to
be under siege in the US in ways that will affect the world in many
ways. Most of all this will be because a Trump administration is going
to go to war on climate action domestically and internationally – on
nature itself and the ways we protect it and thereby protect the
systems on which human life depends.

I was asked to talk about hope. First of all, hope does not mean
saying this is not bad, and it does not mean saying that we can defeat
it. It just means saying we will keep showing up. That we will not
give up. That we will assess our powers and weaknesses and recognise
that the future we face looks grim, but we do not know how it will
unfold, and neither do those we oppose. How it will unfold depends in
no small part on what we do. People too often think hope is smiles and
sunshine, when it’s fury in the face of danger and oppression, and
pressing on in the storm.

But I do not want to talk about hope today, because people so often
confuse it with optimism – which assumes everything will be fine –
or feeling good, though I’ve long said you can be hopeful and
heartbroken, and most of us have had our hearts broken in many ways
and are still standing. Hope is not even the opposite of despair, if
and when you remember that despair is an emotion, not an analysis. You
can feel despair and commit to the hope that the prison-abolition
activist Mariame Kaba
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discipline. Within you the despair can give way to fury that you have
to feel despair, which can itself be the energy to get you out of it.
I’m wary about anger – as George Orwell once observed, it’s
easily redirected, like the flame of a blowlamp, and it has been in
this election as people whose own lives were thwarted economically and
otherwise got on board with the scapegoating of immigrants. So it’s
something to be careful with. Even so, “rage is a form of prayer
too,” as Reverend Dr. Renita J. Weems declared after this terrible
US election.

I suspect she means that behind that rage is care, and this is
something I have found secular activists often forget – you are
angry the children are being bombed or the forest is being cleared
because you care about them, so it’s not the feelings about the
forces of destruction that is primary. It’s the love, and not losing
sight of that is crucial. “The true soldier fights not because he
hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind
him,” GK Chesterson once wrote, explaining why it’s so easy to
lose sight of the prime mover that is love. In some cases. Maga and
the manosphere of internet misogyny and racism and crass punching-down
having-it-both-ways didn’t-really-mean-it jokes has made smirking
cruelty and callousness their brand, and there’s nothing behind that
so far as I can tell but ego, ambition and unconsciousness.

 
Donald Trump concludes a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, one day
before the 2024 US elections.   (Photograph: Chip Somodevilla  //
 The Guardian)
Not being them and not being like them is the first job, not just as
negatives but as an embrace of the ideals of love, kindness,
open-mindedness, the ability to engage with uncertainty and ambiguity,
inclusiveness. “Fight on” might sound like a lot now, but maybe
you can at least not quit, even if you need to take time off, which is
not the same thing as checking out. In stillness and quiet comes the
recharging of self and strength, just as in sleep the body rebuilds
itself. “Back to work – and notably bucking up the younger people
I know with reminders that dignity lies in a refusal to be complicit
and that despair ultimately is a form of complicity,” the LGBTQ
public historian Gerard Koskovich wrote in a note to me.

I do not want to talk about hope. I want to talk about being resolute
and lining up resources, the way people generations ago laid up
supplies for winter. Just like the fossil fuel industry loves doomers
who give up on defeating it, so authoritarians love fear, surrender,
people who’ve decided they’re already defeated, who are already
afraid to resist. Do not give them what they want. After the first
Trump election Timothy Snyder’s first mandate for facing the coming
trouble was: “Do not obey prematurely. Most of the power of
authoritarianism is freely given. A citizen who adapts in this way is
teaching power what it can do.” I’ve half-joked ever since that we
shouldn’t obey maturely, either. There will be all too many
opportunities for direct resistance, not least offering solidarity and
sanctuary to those most under attack, including those who are
immigrants, need reproductive rights, are transgender, or have boldly
spoken up.

There will be practical opportunities to take care of what you love,
including donating, participating, and supporting the ways that towns,
counties, states, and public institutions and private organisations
can and do set their own policies on everything from energy to
education, as they did in the last Trump and Bush administrations.
Blue states may become refuges for those from red states – and
already have when it comes to reproductive rights – and my own
powerful state, California, has again issued a statement of
resistance
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Remember that in the real map of the election no state is pure red or
pure blue – Idaho and Utah are magenta, Vermont is violet, and the
rest are shades of purple. Your allies are everywhere, as are your
opponents.

There are other kinds of resistance that mean making your own life and
your own mind an independent republic in which the pursuit of truth,
human rights, kindness and empathy, the preservation of history and
memory, of being an example of someone living by values other than the
values – if they deserve such a term – of the cruelty, greed, and
dishonesty of Donald Trump
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around him. This does not overthrow the regime, but it does mean being
someone who has not been conquered by it, and it invites others who
have not been or who can throw off the shackles to join you.

Finding community, and building and strengthening relationships, with
people you trust and agree with about these moral and political issues
is also important; it will strengthen you and give you people to act
with when it is time to act. The pandemic and the online world have
given rise to an epidemic of loneliness, which has crushed a lot of us
and made us more susceptible to the worst of what’s out there. The
historian Hannah Arendt wrote (back in that era when “men” meant
all of us): “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the
non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline
experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like
old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses
of our century.”

By reaching out and creating the conditions for mutual support and
encouragement, you become a source of strength to others. When the
election outcome became clear to me late Tuesday night, I wrote:
“Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something
else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are
interwoven with the 10tn things in this single garment of destiny that
has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and
washed.” There’s a false dichotomy between the popular business of
self-care and being engaged and caring for other things; doing the
latter can bring you into community with people who are good for you,
can help you find that dignity Gerard spoke of, can strengthen and
encourage you – and even make you hopeful, because to be around the
best versions of human nature does that for you. There will be heroes
in the crises to come; look for them. Maybe you’ll be one.

Even reading about heroes can remind you of the sheer perseverance and
courage some of us are capable of and maybe make you more capable. We
have heroes, from Nelson Mandela to Malala to Václav Havel to the
Zapatistas and the poets of Gaza to Thich Nhat Hanh
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the Buddhist monks who spoke up against the war in Vietnam to, in the
US, Harriet Tubman and Ella Baker and whole nations of Native
Americans on this continent who, more than 530 years after the
genocides against them began, have not just retained their culture and
identity but have reclaimed land, language, rights, power, and public
participation in this millennium. My friend (and hero) Julian Aguon
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a climate activist and lawyer indigenous to Guam, writes that
Indigenous peoples are those who “have a unique capacity to resist
despair through connection to collective memory and who just might be
our best hope to build a new world rooted in reciprocity and mutual
respect – for the earth and for each other”.

If we are going to talk about hope, I would note that, as Aguon says,
hope does not come from knowing the future; it comes from knowing the
past. Octavia Butler writes: “To try to foretell the future without
studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to
learn the alphabet.” I don’t believe you can foretell it, but I
believe you can learn to recognise the patterns, and what the patterns
teach is unpredictability: a regime suddenly collapses, an unforeseen
revolution emerges from the shadows, public imagination shifts in some
profound way because of work done by people who ignored those who told
them their efforts were futile and their ideas unreasonable, and
public imagination’s shifts lead to new laws and social conditions.
I’ve lived through it with the collapse of the Soviet satellite
states in 1989, the power of the anti-globalisation movements a decade
later, the rise of indigenous leadership in the climate movement, the
way the feminist and anti-racist activism of the last decade changed
the national conversation and some very practical things.

 
The 19th-century US social reformer, abolitionist and statesman
Frederick Douglass.  (Photograph: incamerastock/Alamy  //  The
Guardian)
The study of heroes is one way to ground yourself in memory. The US is
an uneasy cobbling together of different constituencies by race,
class, gender and culture, and those who have been subordinated have
exemplified heroic resistance all along, have given us Geronimo and
Frederick Douglass, Ady Barkan and Harvey Milk, Audre Lorde and Grace
Lee Boggs. This country has been rich in oppression, which might be
why it has also been rich in heroes.

The visionary climate organiser Daniel Hunter wrote guidelines for
facing the next Trump administration; one part of his analysis
declares: “Distrust fuels the flame of autocracy because it makes it
much easier to divide. We can see that in the casual nature of
Trump’s rhetoric – telling people to distrust immigrants,
Democrats, socialists, people from Chicago, women marchers, Mexicans,
the press and so on. This is a social disease: you know whom to trust
by whom they tell you to distrust. Trust-building starts with your own
self. It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building
protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalised.”

His words echo something I learned from Orwell. In Nineteen
Eighty-Four he wrote: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of
your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” It
is only by learning to distrust yourself that you come to trust those
who are unworthy of it, who are transparently dishonest and
self-serving, who offer lies that contradict yesterday’s lies and
new promises after breaking the old ones. If it’s not clear yet,
I’m talking about building a strong self to face what is to come –
how to put that strength to work will emerge as the trouble emerges.
Orwell fortified himself by gardening, taking care of animals,
spending time in nature, as well as through strong friendships and
everyday pleasures. Though he watered his roses, doing so let him turn
back to face totalitarianism and the factories of lies again and again
even as his poor health morphed into slow death at 46.

I believe this election turned out the way it did in no small part
because a large number of Americans are now submerged in new
factories of lies
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insidious than anything Orwell imagined, and that while the worst of
it is the foreign and far-right intentional distortion of reality, too
much of the mainstream media has been deferential and will be more
deferential to authoritarianism and will not stop letting the right
set the agenda about what to be concerned about and what matters. In
fact, I don’t have to believe that disinformation is impactful; I
know it because it’s been documented. The data group Ipsos reports:
“Americans who answer questions about inflation, crime, and
immigration incorrectly are more likely to opt for Trump, while
Americans who answer those questions correctly prefer Harris.”

Many mainstream media voices will urge us to make peace with people
who want to make war on us, to find compromise as if the space halfway
between truth and lies is a good destination, to make nice with
atrocity, because they’ve been doing that energetically at least
since 2016. I believe in leaving the door open for those who might
join us, and in finding ways to reach out and invite in, but that is
compatible with standing on principle, and the strength of that stand
can itself be a convincing argument in ways compromise does not.

The outcome of this election is the result of disinformation and the
rise of a huge rightwing media industry, both as enterprises like Fox
and Newsmax but also the hordes of blogs, podcasts, Russian-produced
propaganda on social media, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, online
subcultures of misogynists and white supremacists and the rest.
Finding and sharing good sources of information is part of the job.
One response I saw after the election was a kind of panicky
plan-making: they are going to do this and that and we have to do this
and that, or we cannot win because I have decided this is the
scenario. But as Roshi Joan Halifax, the abbot of Upaya Zen Center,
said to me, echoing classic Buddhist teachings: “We all live in
radical uncertainty” all the time, adding: “Certainty is a way of
feeling safe but it’s not how reality operates.” We know their
values, we know the announced agendas. But what is to come will be
chaos. Trump seems in mental and physical decline and never had
principles, just a churning, conflicting bunch of hates and cravings
and misunderstandings and no concern for anything but himself. In the
campaign, for example, it was clear he could not grasp how tariffs
work, and his obsession with the fictitious character Hannibal Lecter
seems to be because he conflated insane asylums and refugees seeking
asylum. He is vengeful, incurious, self-serving and incompetent and is
surrounded by ruthlessly ambitious men, starting with JD Vance and
Elon Musk, who have their own agendas. One thing we learned about
Maga-world during the first Trump administration is that corruption
and ambition override loyalty, or rather there was none. There will
almost certainly be a lot of backstabbing and throwing of each other
under various buses.

No one can deal with every issue at once, and choosing which part of
the problem to commit to is part of the work of resistance. Some of
you are already doing important work on human rights or climate or
criminal justice. Some of you can commit to addressing immigration or
the underground railroads for abortions. Some of you will find your
commitment or have skills and resources to bring to multiple issues.
Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest turned anti-war organiser, once
wrote: “One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the
universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something;
and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is
everything.”

We do not know what will happen. But we can know who we can commit to
be in the face of what happens. That is a strong beginning. The fact
that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything,
and everything we can save is worth saving. Let Julian Aguon have the
last word: “No offering is too small. No stone unneeded … All of
us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of
the world.”

_[REBECCA SOLNIT is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of
Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the
climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from
Despair to Possibility
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* Trump 2.0
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* resistance
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* 2024 Elections
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* Donald Trump
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* Kamala Harris
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* Trump Victory
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* Trump voters
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* mutual support
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* disinformation
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* rightwing media
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* hope
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* community
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* Authoritarianism
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* Authoritarians
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* Authoritocracy
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* Fascism
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* democracy
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