Convincing people the game is over is one of the key ways dictators take power. Scholars warn never to consent in advance to what you anticipate an autocrat will demand. If democracy were already gone, there would be no need for Trump and his people to lie and cheat and try to steal this election.
And I would certainly not be writing this letter.
Americans are coming together from all different political positions to fight this attack on our democracy, and we have been in similar positions before. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln spoke under similar circumstances, and noted that Americans who disagreed on almost everything else could still agree to defend their country, just as we are now. Ordinary Americans “rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach---a scythe---a pitchfork-- a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver,” he said. And “when the storm shall be past,” the world “shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”More from Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark (the first edition of which was published in 2004, shortly after Bush II conned America with fear to get elected to a second term),
South America was neoliberalism’s great laboratory, and now it’s the site of the greatest revolts against that pernicious economic doctrine (which might be most tersely defined as the cult of unfettered international capitalism and privatization of goods and services behind what gets called globalization—and might more accurately be called corporate globalization and the commodification of absolutely everything).THIS is the concept that has underpinned the Trump administration start to present. It is behind, under, and throughout the effort by Louis DeJoy to commandeer and destroy the US Postal Service. Trump knows the people aren't going to put up with any of that. That's why he is escalating his desperation rhetoric and the fomentation of chaos in our country.
Which is not to say, forget Iraq, forget the United States, just to say, remember Uruguay, remember Chile, remember Venezuela, remember the extraordinary movements against privatization and for justice, democracy, land reform, and indigenous rights in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina. Not one or the other, but both. South America is important because these communities are inventing a better politics of means and of ends. That continent is also important because twenty years [now 35 years] or so ago, almost all those countries were run by malevolent dictators. We know how the slide into tyranny and fear takes place, how people fall into a nightmare, but how do they wake up from it, how does the slow climb back into freedom and confidence transpire? That road to recovery is something worth thinking about, because Bush is halfway through an eight-year term, not at the start of a thousand-year reich, so far as we can tell. [Obviously, Bush II's reign did not extend beyond 8 years, but Trump clearly has taken up the challenge to go beyond two terms. We can and MUST deny him a second term.]
For history will remember 2004 not with the microscopic lens of we who lived through it the way aphids traverse a rose, but with a telescopic eye that sees it as part of the stream of wild changes of the past few decades, some for the worse, some for the better.
Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (pp. 9-10). Haymarket Books. Kindle Edition.Right now very many Americans are mobilized and mobilizing to prevent Trump from succeeding. We must come to grips with the fact that we are dealing with major uncertainty and risk. But we also must not and will not lose hope.
I remain convinced that Trump ultimately will go down in the November election. But even if he does not, that would, far and away, not be the end of the story. It would be if We the People lay down and accept it. But we will not.
But the despair was something else again. Sometime before the [2004] election was over, I vowed to keep away from what I thought of as “the Conversation,” the tailspin of mutual wailing about how bad everything was, a recitation of the evidence against us... that just buried any hope and imagination down into a dank little foxhole of curled-up despair. Now I watch people having it, wondering what it is we get from it.In 2004, that "Conversation," as Solnit calls it, was NOT being conducted on social media. Neither Facebook nor Twitter were the dominant news outlets they are today. That "Conversation" IS now on FB and Twitter and perhaps other social media. And it's very loud, so to speak. But my voice is loud too. If you're listening to my voice on this blog, please share it on your social media too. It's important.
The certainty of despair—is even that kind of certainty so worth pursuing? Stories trap us, stories free us, we live and die by stories, but hearing people have the Conversation is hearing them tell themselves a story they believe as is being told to them. What other stories can be told? How do people recognize that they have the power to be storytellers, not just listeners? Hope is the story of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the risk involved in not knowing what comes next, which is more demanding than despair and, in a way, more frightening. And immeasurably more rewarding.I refuse to throw hope away. I will keep telling stories of hope. Please listen, please speak up, please share HOPE.
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.
Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (p. 11). Haymarket Books. Kindle Edition.
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