On the Brink. Hope or Despair?
Earlier this week I finished reading No Straight Road Takes You There, a new collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit. Solnit presents her usual sharp and insightful criticism of so much that’s happening these days. At the same time, she insists that anyone looking at developments over the long haul has reason to hope that things could be better. She insists that such hope is strategically important. Anyone who is convinced that all is lost has little reason to work toward creating a better future. Moreover, she argues that engaging in work for a better world is particularly important for those of us with privilege.
For those of us whose lives are already easy, giving up means making those lives even easier, at least in terms of effort. For the directly impacted, giving up means surrendering to devastation. Giving up on their behalf is not solidarity. And I doubt that anyone in desperate straits has ever taken comfort in the idea that somewhere far safer, people are bitter and despondent on their behalf or have decided they are doomed (p. 69).
Hope, or at least controlled despair, can lead to action. It’s crucial that anyone inclined to believe that all is lost would do well to remember that the current situation, bad as it is in many ways, is better in other ways than the state of things a generation ago. Solnit is definitely not saying that one should accept things as they are now, but she holds out hope that acting decisively now could make a positive difference in how things develop.
Contrast this message with that of M. Gessen (gift link) in this morning’s New York Times. Gessen argues powerfully that we are entering a new stage in U.S. politics, a stage in which the shocking has become familiar.
The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chain saw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms.
…
And now that has become familiar. I’ve reported on many wars, and I’ve seen how they come to feel routine — to the people living through them, the people reporting on them and the people reading about them. Wars have a limited repertoire: bombings, shellings, offensives, counteroffensives, body counts. After the initial shock, few people keep track of the shifting front line.
Gessen is echoing here a report of what some are calling hypernormalization; one of the biggest challenges we face today is the challenge of not accepting so many outrageous actions as part of the new normal.
I know that Solnit didn’t write the essays collected in her book recently — some are as old as 2020 — and I know that she agrees with Gessen that Trump’s abuses of the system are piling up. Again, she’s not pushing hope because she’s convinced everything will be all right. She’s pushing hope because it leaves room for uncertainty, and uncertainty – not knowing how the future will develop – leaves room for acting now in ways that shape a future that we want for ourselves, for other people, and for the greater-than-human world.
In this respect I’m encouraged by this missive from Heather Cox Richardson. Richardson draws on the work of Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica to highlight just how unsuccessful the Trump administration has been in the federal courts: “Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration.” Richardson goes on to highlight other losses in federal courts yesterday. Both she and Bonica recognize that the record of the Supreme Court on Trump cases has been more mixed, and it’s not at all clear how these cases will play out over the long haul. Bonica also points out that the harsh and strident criticism that Trump has directed toward judges who decide against him is a standard element in the would-be autocrat’s playbook.
When the courts rule against the leader, the leader and his loyalists attack judges as biased and dangerous, just as Trump and his cronies have been doing.The leader also works to delegitimize the judicial system, and that, too, we are seeing as Trump reverses the concepts of not guilty and guilty. On the one hand, the administration is fighting to get rid of the constitutional right of all persons to due process, rendering people who have not been charged with crimes to prisons in third countries. On the other, Trump and his loyalists at the Department of Justice are pardoning individuals who have been convicted of crimes.
Trump hopes to destroy anything resembling judicial independence in the United States. Yet Richardson, following Bonica, leaves some room for hope. But it’s not only hope. It’s also a call for action. Bonica points out that an autocrat’s criticisms of the judicial system has worked, at least for a short time, in establishing and maintaining autocratic control in multiple countries. But he notes one exception. Despite Benjamin Netanyahu’s success so far in maintaining the horrible abuse of human rights in Gaza, his 2023 attempt to abolish judicial independence failed. And it failed because people took to the streets. “Every authoritarian who successfully destroyed judicial independence did so because civil society failed to unite in time,” Bonica writes. “The key difference? Whether people mobilized.”
Hope: yes, as much as one can muster. Despair: yes, a despair that acknowledges the weight of the challenges we face. But, out of both of these, action. May 14’s No Kings Day is an opportunity for such action.