How to summon hope when everything is terrible

Part two of my interview with Rebecca Solnit

Yesterday we ran part one of my conversation with the writer and thinker Rebecca Solnit. That part of the conversation focused on the fight for progress and the need for a left that is joyous, inviting, and expansionary, not angry, Puritanical, and closed.

It sparked a lot of discussion online! Which is always a good thing. In case you missed it, here is that conversation.

Rebecca Solnit wants a joyous, inviting left — not an angry, Puritanical one

Now, today, on to part two. Below is a conversation about what’s really going on in the minds of those drawn to fascism today, what a positive and life-giving climate movement looks like, and why it’s OK to take time to smell the roses — and even grow them! — in bleak times, while fighting the many fights that need fighting.

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I want to switch gears and ask you about what's going on with people on the right rather than the left. I underlined this phrase when I was rereading one of your books yesterday: “the emotions and perceptions that underlie our political positions and engagements.” I love that phrase because it captures so much of how I think about politics. 

And I think not a lot of people actually think about politics like that, that there are two layers: the positions and engagements, and then the emotions and perceptions below, which is so obvious, but a lot of people in politics really think that people are actually exercised about the border, actually exercised about critical race theory in schools or whatever. But my view is that something deeper is going on with people, particularly in moments like this.

When you look not at elites on the right, but at the regular people who are attracted to American fascism today, there is this pretty significant minority of Americans staring American fascism in the face and saying, “Let's try that, let's try that again.” When you look at the level of hatred around issues of trans rights, or the border, what do you think are the underlying fears and anxieties — the pre-political kind of fears and anxieties — that help explain why the country is in such a dangerous place politically?

One thing I think about a lot, thanks to the internet, is that hate and anger and that kind of self-righteous indignation are the easiest emotions to stir up. I think of them as cheap emotions. 

Love, dedication, and solidarity require more skillful rhetoric, among other things. And they don't create the mob ready to rip the other limb from limb. They create more complex, more self-aware responses. 

Anger really narrows down perception and closes minds. And I think that demagogues on the right have always used it. There's always been a bogeyman: the KKK was talking about blacks, Catholics, and Jews a hundred plus years ago. The right has always told its key audience in this country, which is the white Christian former majority, that they're under threat, whether it's by communists, or left-wing people with progressive ideas, or feminazis.

I think that they're being manipulated, and what's startling to me about the base of the right is how eager they are to be manipulated, like dogs that will chase any stick you throw for them. This week it's Islamofascists or Muslim terrorists. Next week it'll be trans kids. And then we've been going to immigrants since at least the 1990s as this terrible threat.

And of course — I speak as a granddaughter of refugees and great-granddaughter of more refugees on the other side — we were always treated as outsiders, whether it was Irish Catholics in the mid-nineteenth century, or eastern European Jews in the early 20th, or non-white people in more recent decades. Xenophobia is a really easy thing to manipulate, as is racism.

So it feels like on the right are people who are willing to be manipulated this way. And I just wonder if some of them are like, “Wait, the worst threat right now is immigrants? Wasn't it just trans people? Before that, wasn't it Black people with the big Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020?”

I feel like that's part of it. And then they're also manipulated by being told that their way of life is threatened and that everybody despises them, which is also a very classic kind of demagogic propaganda tactic.

Paul Waldman of The Washington Post wrote a really powerful essay a few years ago saying that Democrats, liberals are constantly being told that if we could just show more respect to the right, they wouldn't hate and want to harm us so much. But the truth is that it's not us telling them that — it's their own leaders and there's nothing we can do to stop that.

And that’s an incredibly valuable framework. What's interesting, though, is that I think it's mostly backlash that people who felt that a white Protestant majority country was their country, and who also feel very frightened of being in a much more diverse country in which white Protestants and all their heteronormative whatever are not going to be the dominant culture. They're still fairly dominant, but they're not the only game in town. They're not. 

And then I think another piece of it is Fox News and other propaganda outlets. It seems likely that if Rupert Murdoch had never come to this country and if the internet hadn't created all these extremely effective avenues for spreading hate and disinformation, and for radicalizing people, we might be in a really different country.

I want to push on this idea — I agree with you, obviously, that this is all very ginned up and sold to people and amplified by these outlets — but based on reporting I've done over the years in some of these communities, part of me also thinks that there's a truth in the idea that we are actually asking for a lot of change in people's lives in this era. And rightfully so. These are changes that I deeply and desperately believe in.

But if you start to add up the amount of progress/change in daily life and families that are the result of gender progress and new ideas of the roles of men and women, if you think about racial change as you grew up in a 80 percent white country, never thinking about being white or about race, and then suddenly you're in a kind of country that is very race conscious and the demographics are changing, dealing with people you didn't deal with in your childhood…

If you think about how we suddenly start trading with China at the beginning of this century and suddenly all these jobs that people used to do in your town don't exist anymore and there's a new thing and there's not really a lot of help. Or climate change means the things you ate, maybe you shouldn't be eating anymore, the thing you drove, maybe you shouldn't be driving anymore.

Maybe you feel like a bad person. You can go down the list. I don't think it's just propaganda. I think in many ways you and I subscribe to a vision of progress that actually is asking for a lot of people to have a new sense of themselves, to have a different sense of how they fit into the order of things around them. 

And I don't think we necessarily have a plan for those people. We have a declared end state, but it's just sort of like, please figure it out and report for duty. And I don't know, I think it's actually a pretty tough challenge. I've seen it in other countries. It's a tough challenge when you expect very large numbers of people to kind of affectively fit differently into the world and come up with that for themselves. And it's almost like there's something laissez faire in doing these big social changes and then just saying, “OK, figure out how to be a man now in a new conception.” Can you reflect on what we are asking of people in this era?