ICYMI: Hope in dark times with Rebecca Solnit

Revisit our conversation with the activist, author, and philosopher of change on staying hopeful, and tending your garden

As we come to the end of a tumultuous 2024 and look ahead to 2025, it’s tempting to tune out; it's easy to give in to despair. Oligarchs dominate the national conversation, and the incoming administration threatens the freedoms we’ve taken for granted, with scant hope for relief to come from the courts or Congress. The new year, for many progressives, looms rather than beckons, and we get it — it’s hard to stay positive, to maintain the energy to do the work it will take to build a better future.

In such times, there’s no better voice to turn to than Rebecca Solnit. We encourage you to look back to our two-part interview with Solnit from earlier this year. In the first part, she talks about how to build a left that is joyous, inviting, and expansionary rather than angry, Puritanical, and closed, and how to engage with the things that are best about America while taking into account the challenges of this country at its worst. In the second, we discuss the challenge of dealing with the right, how to understand the people left behind by change, why voting matters — and how she learned from George Orwell that it’s O.K. to tend your garden too.

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We hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. We want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do, and we promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still.

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Can you talk about how you think progressives view America? And I'm thinking about this partly because often progressive movements come off or are defined as America-hating in a way that is often ginned up, but is actually based in some kind of truthful intuition.

I think that’s a really important part of what part of the left gets wrong, and here I'm going to detour a little and say I finally published a piece about something that's bugged me for a long time, which is that when we talk about the left, I think we're talking about two really different contingents. And that even the term “the left,” which dates back to the French Revolution, really maybe isn't useful anymore.

Just like “right” can mean both old-school conservatives or the radical right, and the white male Christian nationalists that we have now are really different than Bob Dole or even Mitt Romney, there are two lefts:

First, there’s an old-school left, which is often dominated by these kinds of white male pundits, many of whom have since gone over to the right in the Trump era, which I think we're still in unfortunately.

And then there's what I think of — after Jesse Jackson — as the “rainbow coalition left,” which is diverse, feminist, anti-racist. And the left I want, the left I love, the left I hope to be part of, believes in universal human rights and absolute equality. And it doesn't tolerate authoritarianism either within movements or as a form of government.

And I think that a big part of the American left supported the USSR back in the day, the '30s through the '50s and after, and supported Stalin. And I still find that kind of breaks my brain because Stalin was maybe one of history's most brutal human rights abusers, to the tune of 20 million of his own people dead, mass genocide projects in Ukraine and with ethnic minorities in Siberia, Crimean, Tatars, and deeply hierarchical.

I hate to talk about a monolith when I actually see many contingents. And I do feel like there are movements and parts of movements around immigrants' rights, around queer culture, that are joyful, celebratory, and invite people in.

There are also things like the climate movement, where at the center there's a very different understanding than the people around the edges have. For example, I'm constantly hearing that young people are afraid to have babies because of the climate crisis, but the climate scientists and organizers I know are all having babies. Their worldview is not the same as the people on the periphery.

So I also feel like we have a performative left or a pundit left, which makes a lot of noise, and people on social media who make a lot more noise. And then the people who are actually making things happen — passing legislation, building movements, organizing demonstrations — and they are often not afflicted with all these problems because if they were, they'd just be really shitty organizers and they might be unable to be organizers, because you have to welcome people with whom you have some — but not all — things in common and encourage them.

When you think about that question of understanding the fundamental nature of the United States, after all of that or underneath all of that, do you think of the United States as having special merits that are worth talking about, worth championing, that survive all the hypocrisies and other critiques? And what do you think that thing is, if there is something there for you?

To get at that question, I want to start with the opening of “The 1619 Project,” that beautiful winning sentence that states, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”

We all understand very well at this point how the idea that all men are created equal really only included men and not women, property owners and white men, and not the indigenous and Black populations that were such a huge presence in 1776 and 1789.

There was a bumper sticker in the 1980s and '90s I loved that said, “I love my country, but I fear my government.” And what even is the U.S.? And I feel like it's an empire because it exists by having taken the land of hundreds of native nations, agglomerated as an empire. And the history of the South is very different than the history of New England. And I grew up out here in the West. I'm sitting here in California, which we stole from Mexico in 1848.

And, still, there's so much I love. I love my country, I love my state. I just got off a conversation with Mike Davis's daughter because I'm going to write something about Mike. And Mike loved California and he loved the West. I love a lot of the particulars. I love the physical place.

I love a lot of the things we've generated that have had wonderful global impact, many of them pushing back against the dominant culture, but in ways that were happening here and not elsewhere: the civil rights movement, gay liberation, the women's movement.

And there's this wonderful trajectory you can trace. There’s a Martin Luther King comic that was created to make his ideas really accessible in the late '50s, and it was translated into Arabic and circulated in the Arabic-speaking world, where it contributed to the Arab Spring, or ACT UP activists focusing on medical care for AIDS, who were modeling how to do it, in some ways, for AIDS activists in South Africa and other parts of the world.

So I think there's always been this beautiful visionary thing in the U.S., and there's always been the opposite, too. There's always been people who want hierarchy, who want inequality, who want elitism, and they're very powerful in the Republican Party right now, and the Democratic Party is imperfectly holding the opposite position.

I just look at all these movements we've generated, the abolitionist movement (though there I have to admit that the British abolitionist movement comes first and succeeds first). But the way that the American abolitionist movement gave rise to the first real women's movement. And I see, as a Californian, really good ideas coming out of this place again and again, revolutions around food, around culture, around how we can live.

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.

One of the things that was so dismaying when Russia invaded Ukraine was all these left-wing idiots who essentially took Russia's side and blamed it all on NATO, who didn't know that Russia had been a colonial imperial genocidal power before the United States existed. And who also had this reflexive idea — that I think goes back to the Vietnam War in particular and then the Iraq war — that the U.S. is always in the wrong. All foreign interventions are evil.

And of course there are lots of evil ones. You can go back to the Spanish-American War and why we have Puerto Rico and Guam and Guantanamo. But you can also go back to World War II in which the U.S. throws its weight into the war and does these remarkable things.

But certainly the European and the Pacific wars would've been radically different in their outcomes had the U.S. not shown up. I feel there's a kind of ignorance, a substitution of memes and slogans for knowing history, that really makes people stupid.

So there I was like, how shall I finish this sentence? And there are much more subtle and tasteful ways to do it. But I think when you come to people blaming the invasion of Ukraine on NATO and pretending NATO is nothing but a puppet of the United States (which Eastern European historians call “westsplaining”), stupid is a pretty good word for it, these uninformed all-or-nothing oversimplifications.

I was just thinking of Robert Jay Lifton's term “thought-terminating clichés,” which is when you respond to a complex or ambiguous situation with some little slogan, a phrase that dismisses it as something we already know and don't have to think about anymore. This is something I have been saying about the horrific situation in Israel and Gaza right now. Categories are where thoughts go to die and people stuff into really neat categories: everybody in this group is like this; everybody in that group is like that. And they never have to think about it again.

And so many of the things in our world, the political beliefs of Israelis and Palestinians, the history of almost any place, is nuanced and complicated. And categories tend to be leaky if you really pay attention to what they are.

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.

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It’s an essential conversation, and we think you’ll come away from it hopeful, energized, and more ready to face a future of change. To read the full interview, click the links below.

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Photo: Visions of America/Joseph Sohm/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. Rebecca Solnit photo: Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images.