Rebecca Solnit writes (on FB at least):
Someone posted a piece whose premise is “why is no one doing anything?” To be slightly more polite, I’m turning my comment on it into a separate post. People who say “no one is doing anything” need to go to where people are doing things.
Lots of people are doing lots of things, and some of them started doing them the day after the election; the climate groups I’m part of starting planning well before the election, and I’m sure they’re not alone. The ACLU is super-busy. Lawyers are suing like crazy. Democratic state a.g.s are talking every morning about their collective lawsuits. Protestors are in the streets, maybe 5 million at No Kings, there’s lots of interference with ICE, 50501 was created expressly for this, Indivisible is growing by leaps and bounds, I’m seeing so many photographs of so many signs on overpasses, people are stepping up to help immigrants in all sorts of ways…
The piece that provoked me listed as our survival mechanisms “Freeze. Fawn. Flight,” a version of fight-or-flight that has been superseded. Because also among the repertoire of survival mechanisms is: tend and befriend (which might have emerged when more behavioral scientists studied more women). Tend and befriend when it’s larger groups is known as solidarity. I see people acting in solidarity all over and I post about it regularly in the hopes that fewer people will say “no one is doing anything.” But it’s an even more generous than a survival strategy, because in this crisis, many people who are not under threat are trying to tend and befriend those who are, sometimes taking serious risks to do so. Choose your stories carefully.
p.s. From the original 2000 paper on tend and befriend (link in comments): “The human stress response has been characterized, both physiologically and behaviorally, as “fight-or-flight.” Although fight-or-flight may characterize the primary physiological responses to stress for both males and females, we propose that, behaviorally, females’ responses are more marked by a pattern of “tend-and-befriend.” Tending involves nurturant activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce distress; befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process.”
Solnit is right and yet institutions are falling, one after the other, across every sector. The US left is in love with this kind of atomized activity, which is great except that Trump & Co are taking over centralized infrastructures. The left ALSO needs to rediscover popular frontism: mass, coordinated action — the kind where everyone shows up with the same sign, not whatever clever quip they thought up, as if they were going to a Halloween parade and their message was their costume. In particular, the left needs to start striking: wildcat strikes, general strikes, and any other kind of strike that shuts something down — a site, a street, a service, a system. Tactics like that will become especially important as Trump & Co move on to their next phase, attacking urban centers.
And Solnit is also wrong. The list of things that are not happening is even longer:
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Are Democrats as in the Democratic Party developing effective political strategies for retaking the government at every level?
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Are legal professionals planning how to root out and ruthlessly punish all this corruption and make sure these fascists never, ever come an anywhere near power again?
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Are financial and legal professionals collaborating on how to trace and seize all the wealth being generated and extracted — crypto, fraud, insider trading, etc — amidst all this corruption?
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Are media and legal professionals working together to put an end to the right’s poisonous media empires?
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Are technologists and legal professionals working to identify the oceans of data that DOGE stole and to remediate the consequences?
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Are scientists planning the next generation of institutions to replace NIH, NSF, etc with something even better?
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Are scholars asserting their power in universities and organizing with students to challenge administrations that have run amok?
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Are social scientists planning effective strategies for reforming institutions — educational, social, even parental — in order to fix this continent-wide factory for broken people? (If you think that sounds daft, you need to learn more about the history of progressive education — maybe start with Maria Montessori.)
If these things aren’t happening “at scale,” and they are not, the fascists will win — because they are doing these things.