The Trump administration has declared a war on words — some 200 of them and counting. Reporting by The Times found that words like “inclusion” and “identity” have been flagged by agencies, with instruction to avoid them or even remove them from government websites and curriculums, part of the wider initiative to scrub diversity and inclusion initiatives from public life. Some words under scrutiny are so neutral they invite surprise (“belong,” “women”). Others are so universally regarded as vacuous and performative (“allyship”), few might mourn them.
One word, however, seems to have proved shifty enough to slip the net of the censors and hardy enough to retain its moral power. “Solidarity,” a word of the old left, is being shaken free of mothballs and tailored to fit the hopes of the moment. Solidarity is the “one idea that can save democracy,” according to the organizers Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor, who call for a solidarity on the left — a “transformative solidarity” — that confers dignity to all, as opposed to the “reactionary solidarity” on the right, based on a politics of exclusion.
Recent work, and fresh hope, constellate around the word, tracing its history (Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor’s “Solidarity”), its aesthetics (Eszter Szakács and Naeem Mohaiemen’s “Solidarity Must Be Defended”), its contradictions and potential (Sarah Schulman’s “The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity,” Aruna D’Souza’s “Imperfect Solidarities”). There are case studies of specific campaigns (Daisy Pitkin’s “On the Line”), oral histories (the Pinko Collective’s “After Accountability”), documentaries (“Plan C,” “The Strike,” the Oscar-winning “No Other Land”), even a play (Bess Wohl’s “Liberation,” currently off Broadway). I omit, for the sake of speeding things along, recent fiction. The South Korean novelist and Nobel laureate Han Kang and the Irish writer Claire Keegan, for example, are preoccupied with the essential questions of solidarity: When we understand ourselves as implicated in larger histories, as entangled in other people’s stories and fates, what choices will we make? What do we risk when we make other people, in the words of the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, our business and our bond?
These books explore solidarity not as a philosophical proposition but as a distinctive and delicate form of intimacy. Solidarity — a notion so oddly elastic and enticingly vague — is the art and practice of sharing in another’s struggle, of making common cause. If the nostalgic notion of solidarity conjures workers united in purpose, their voices and placards raised in unison, this new thinking examines the inner mechanisms of solidarity, before it blossoms into communal feeling — the meetings, the awkward conversations, the earnestness, the errors.
The errors. These excavations of solidarity might be prompted by a particular paradox. In recent years, Americans flooded the streets in unprecedented numbers. After Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the Women’s March mobilized millions, many for the first time. Four years later, as many as 26 million people protested the killing of George Floyd in one of the largest movements in American history. Since the fall of 2023, students have held hundreds of demonstrations at college campuses across the country calling for cease-fire in Gaza.
“The 21st century has witnessed the biggest protests, and the most popular petitions, in history, yet they have produced comparatively small effects,” Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor have noted. The backlashes to a movement for racial justice have been powerful, but organizations on the left also failed to channel the political energy, hope and grief. Progressive groups that coalesced around trauma turned the trauma inward. Activists proclaimed unity and preached collective action, but they found themselves divided along lines of identity or fracturing over conflicts that bewildered outsiders; coalitions that once seemed secure self-destructed on demands for purity.
People were radicalized and left with no place to go, the scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor said in a panel discussion after Trump’s re-election last year. Since he returned to office, progressives have been searching for action that meets the moment. But calls for a collective response to Trump 2.0 ignore a rickety foundation of specious unity, transactional politics and fragile coalition.
The national director of the Working Families Party, Maurice Mitchell, struck a warning note in 2022. “Executives in professional social-justice institutions, grass-roots activists in local movements and fiery young radicals on protest lines are all advancing urgent concerns about the internal workings of progressive spaces,” he wrote in The Forge, a magazine of community organizing. “Most read their experiences as interpersonal conflict gone awry, the exceptional dynamics of a broken environment.”
These new studies of solidarity feel like efforts to develop more durable organizations and bonds, to amass tools for coping with conflict beyond shaming and expulsion (or, to borrow a word used by critics, “cancellation”). They are reminders of what makes relationships of solidarity unique — that they are inherently conditional and built across differences. There are relationships to be found here but not necessarily refuge.
“Part of the fantasy of being in solidarity is a magical combination of pure motive, clean action and predictably victorious outcome,” Schulman writes in “The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity.” “Part of the fantasy is that we will do everything right and give up nothing and the afflicted will love us, as we will love each other and ourselves.” She adds, “Well, it is not that way.”
Let us take Schulman as our guide through this reckoning. A novelist and playwright, she is also known for her nonfiction, which mingles autobiographical writing, advocacy and scholarship to address the intricacies of organizing work and solidarity — the practice of being “root-tangled in the grit of human arrangements,” in the words of Adrienne Rich. Schulman was a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, ACT UP, the direct-action group committed to ending the AIDS crisis. Her earlier book “Let the Record Show” (2021), based on nearly two decades of interviews with former members of ACT UP New York, captures the energy and tactics of the group’s Monday-night meetings, which attracted hundreds — the commitment and, crucially, the conflicts.
“ACT UP was structured in a way that allowed individuals to do what they needed to do, even if others disagreed,” she recalls in her new book. “It just seems that when you have to win, when you are desperate for change and must be effective, radical democracy is the only path that works.”
Solidarity, she argues, can save us, but we need to save it first — chiefly from its own good press. It must be stripped of all that has made it saintly in the popular imagination, a magic trick or act of spontaneous efflorescence — all that has made it seem impractical or impossible. Above all, examples of solidarity need to be seen, surfaced from the past, so we can understand it as “doable,” Schulman insists.
Often the mediagenic activist or figurehead gets his or her monument, but the movement itself, in its fractiousness, in its ongoing life, is erased. In her MoMA museum survey last year, “Monuments of Solidarity,” the photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier flipped this convention; her portraits celebrated the rank-and-file union members and activists. In Schulman’s and Frazier’s work, history is recounted not as a form of memorialization but as a blueprint. Solidarity is contagious; disobedience begets disobedience. What ignited ACT UP was not just the urgency in the room or the members who were dying but the experience, specifically of women like Schulman, veterans of movements for reproductive justice.
In times of natural disaster, we expect solidarity — witness the community responses to the California wildfires that secured for one another medical aid, shelters, diapers and formula. “People are naturally connective and generous,” the lawyer and activist Dean Spade writes in “Mutual Aid” (2020). Solidarity does not require unblemished souls or flawless political analysis; it must be understood as a form of awareness that is native to us, that sees the health of the individual and the collective as bound and yearns to respond in kind, just as sunflowers in a field angle their heads just so, to best share the light. Nature is full of such examples, as new research shows — not always competitive but collaborative. I plucked those sunflowers from Zoë Schlanger’s survey of the new field of plant intelligence, “The Light Eaters” (2024), which includes examples of plant roots’ making room for one another, trees’ sending one another chemical alerts of distress.
“Solidarity is the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter,” Schulman writes. “Solidarity is the action behind the revelation that each of us, individually, are the only people with dreams.”
What could be more reasonable? And yet.
The concept of solidarity made its first written appearance in the legal documents of ancient Rome, which established the notion of joint liability, a debt held in solidum. If a group of farmers lease a single plot of land, for example, and one becomes unable to pay his share of the rent, the others must cover it. The notion of the shared debt profoundly inspired the French statesman Léon Bourgeois, who in 1896 made the case that each of us is born in solidum, “a debtor to society.” It’s a neglected story; I crib it from Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor’s “Solidarity: The Past, Present and Future of a World-Changing Idea,” in which they trace the history of the movement he popularized, Solidarism, which laid the foundation for social security and public health in France.
Social debt, Bourgeois argued, need not be felt as a burden; it can be enjoyed as a benefit, just as we enjoy the bequest of our bodies or our common language. Solidarity ought to be understood as a universal, scientific principle: Not even the stars hang in place thanks to their efforts alone, he explained. Celestial bodies keep one another aloft.
Such a pretty thought; how do we square it with what we have seen?
If there is a lingering lesson of the pandemic, it has been a harsh one — that the realization of our enmeshment does not itself produce a sense of responsibility. Five years ago, at the start of the pandemic, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy called the coronavirus a “communovirus” that would reveal the previously overlooked communal aspects of human and ecological life — the air we share and breathe, the essential workers on whom we all depend. We responded accordingly, at first — retreating indoors, forming mutual-aid organizations that sourced masks and other P.P.E. for hospitals.
But those very symbols of interdependency — masks, vaccines — became targeted, as bitter reminders of our shared vulnerability.
An ethic of isolation, of indifference, can so easily take hold and can so easily be enforced. As a policy, social distancing was officially lifted long ago, but in another sense, it has become the spiritual law of the land. We retreated into our homes — are we lingering there still? Our notion of “we” only grows narrower.
In recent years, Americans and Europeans have been arrested because they committed what Amnesty International calls “crimes of solidarity” — giving migrants food or water, even transporting them to a hospital. On the right, solidarity is being coded as a variety of liberal manipulation. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio canceled his trip to the G20 summit in South Africa last month, he posted on social media: “South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability.’ In other words: DEI and climate change. My job is to advance America’s national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism.” A distrust of solidarity, even empathy, is being seeded: See new books by the conservative Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” and the theologian Joe Rigney, “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.”
In Schulman’s latest, she describes the great psychological impediment to entering relationships of solidarity, which is that deep down, we want to be comfortable with ourselves; we have the child’s fury and terror of feeling that we might have been part of something that is wrong. Her books chart the awareness and suppression of this feeling, through social movements and her own life. The figure of the bystander haunts her work. Several members of her family were killed in the Holocaust. As a child, she would listen to stories about the neighbors who stood by and did nothing. She has written about breaking with her family’s Zionism, of understanding — with pain and surprise — the internal mechanisms that made her a bystander, kept her from acknowledging Palestinian suffering.
That feeling of being wrong, of abiding discomfort — within ourselves and with others — became the subject of her book “Conflict Is Not Abuse” (2016), a call to differentiate our feelings of pain or uneasiness from our perception that we are being attacked. “Social endurance” is the organizer Mie Inouye’s term for our ability to hold such emotions. Without it, alliances can — and have — become brittle.
“I think the biggest problem that we face in movement spaces and in the radical community is conflict avoidance,” a veteran organizer shares in “After Accountability,” a set of interviews with activists sparked by the collapse of so many left-wing organizations. “Of course, some are going to say, ‘Oh I’m conflict averse because of my trauma.’ But let’s be honest, conflict aversion is built into the framework of our society.”
And built into the frameworks of many organizations on the left is a politics of deference, as the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has described, making guilt or complicity the basis of solidarity and focusing on exacting penance and individual culpability instead of cultivating collective responsibility and future action. The voices of marginalized people are seemingly elevated but in reality very distorted; we demand spectacles of suffering and the performance of trauma. We disregard that pain might be a poor teacher or that the privileged might have useful insight. Under such strictures, cultures of fear and empty affirmation can arise. Distrust becomes the operating principle.
In “The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity,” Schulman devotes a lengthy section to a transcript of a public conversation with the writer Morgan M. Page in Montreal in 2016. The catalyst was a controversy. Earlier that year, Schulman delivered a eulogy to a friend, the trans artist Bryn Kelly. She deliberately included details about Kelly’s state of mind, the method of suicide, sitting with the body. According to Schulman, she was bitterly criticized by many in the trans community for what they assumed was a rogue effort that seemed designed to make her own points instead of celebrate Kelly’s life.
In conversation with Page, Schulman explained that the speech was approved by Kelly’s partner and friends and delivered in the spirit of the political funerals during the thick of the AIDS pandemic; she wanted to dispel the fantasy of suicide as any kind of solution. She took questions from those in the audience who had felt wounded or angered. What’s striking in the transcript is the lack of defensiveness on the part of Schulman, who might have felt unfairly criticized (most of her critics had not even known Kelly), or those who objected to the language of the eulogy. Emotions were not used as excuses to escalate the conflict or leave it entirely; instead, the people in the room seem to move closer together.
“The emergence of conflict does not have to mean that someone is bad or to blame,’’ Spade counsels in “Mutual Aid,” “and the more we can normalize conflict, the more likely we can address it and come through it stronger, rather than burning out and leaving the group or the movement and/or causing damage to others.”He offers some practical strategies, including: “Remember, no one made us feel this way, but we are having strong feelings, and they deserve our caring attention.”
This, I must admit, is much of the same language I use with my toddler. Are we so lost that we need such instruction? It can seem comical, but where do we see conflict modeled well? Not skirted or turned incendiary? Such modeling is so rare that I remember specific instances — for example, the dialogue between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde printed in Essence magazine in 1984. “Jimmy, we don’t have an argument,” Lorde says. “I know we don’t,” Baldwin responds, to which she replies, “But what we do have is a real disagreement.” They do not allow each other to find false commonalities or to cocoon themselves in injury away from finding, even provisionally, a common language. At the crux of their conversation is how to speak of the differences between them — openly, productively and without a sense of competition. “Truly dealing with how we live, recognizing each other’s differences, is something that hasn’t happened,” Lorde tells Baldwin. “When we deal with sameness only, we develop weapons that we use against each other when the differences become apparent. And we wipe each other out — Black men and women can wipe each other out — far more effectively than outsiders do.”
It’s tempting to attempt a thesis here, to tie the decline of social endurance or conflict endurance to social media, perhaps, or the pandemic. In their new book, “Conflict Resilience,” the legal scholar Robert Bordone and the neurologist Joel Salinas make a case that our social muscles are profoundly atrophied. Bordone, who negotiates conflicts between corporations and governments, describes being increasingly called in to oversee conflicts among ordinary people and families who could not resolve even minor differences. The authors offer case studies and simple tips to develop conflict endurance, of holding discomfort in the body: “Building muscle for conflict holding, like building muscle for your arms, quads or calves, is a process, not a one-and-done event.”
Have we gone from a world of no-contact deliveries to a world where familial disagreements increasingly go the “no-contact” route, where there is an “epidemic of estrangement,” in the name of avoiding conflict and pain? But to read these accounts of solidarity is to realize that these calls have been part of every era, every movement.
“Some people will come to a coalition, and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there,” the singer and activist Bernice Reagon said in an influential 1981 speech at a women’s music festival, later published as “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century.” “They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home! They’re looking for a bottle with some milk in it and a nipple, which does not happen in a coalition. You don’t get a lot of food in a coalition. You don’t get fed a lot in a coalition. In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home.”
In the work of the filmmaker Ken Loach, however, solidarity is often formed over a meal or a drink. His long, celebrated career has been an excavation of British working-class life over the last half century. His latest film, “The Old Oak” (2023), is set on the precipice of Brexit in a former mining town, one of many that crumbled after the failed 1984-85 miners’ strike against the Thatcherite government’s plan to shut the pits down. Named for a local pub, the film depicts the town’s vicious reaction to the arrival of a group of Syrian refugees.
One Syrian woman, a photographer, befriends the pub owner, and she notices, in the back room, photographs of the miners’ strike. She learns about the communal dinners the strikers organized (“we eat together to stick together” is written beneath a photo) and arranges to bring the townspeople and refugees together.
“The Old Oak” might be Loach’s most hopeful film — he has said it will be his last — but there is not a happy ending; rather, like the K of the pub’s Old Oak sign that won’t stay straight, mutual recognition and trust must be attended to continuously. Solidarity has to be nurtured before the crisis, he seems to say. Our numbers make it possible; no one person needs to do it alone or invent it afresh — just as the photographs on the wall reminded the townspeople of the solidarity that is their inheritance.
Although it is never referenced in the film, I wondered if the title is meant to recall another oak tree. In Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” an old oak appears twice. Prince Andrey, grieving his dead wife, sees it from a carriage. It is a horrible thing, gnarled and still stripped bare in the early spring. Days later, he searches for it again. “The old oak, quite transfigured,” he marvels. “Neither gnarled fingers nor old scars nor old doubts and sorrows were any of them in evidence now. Through the hard century-old bark, even where there were no twigs, leaves had sprouted such as one could hardly believe the old veteran could have produced.”
Concepts have strange careers. They can name what lies in plain sight, but sometimes they do more mysterious work; they hold memory of what lies hidden, what waits to emerge again — like the sudden shock of the young green leaves. The old oak transmits to Prince Andrey a wild feeling of joy and renewal, and immediately he seeks to share it — to share himself — with his family, with “everyone.” “My life,” he decides, “may not be lived for myself alone.”
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