Solidarity Among Progressives Could Give New Life to Their Cause

Magazine|The Old Idea That Could Give New Life to Progressive Politics

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.