Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea - Softcover

Hunt-Hendrix, Leah; Taylor, Astra

 
9780593686997: Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593686993 ISBN 13: 9780593686997
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A VULTURE BEST BOOK • From renowned organizers and activists Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor, comes the first in-depth examination of Solidarity—not just as a rallying cry, but as potent political movement with potential to effect lasting change.

A DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE FINALIST

“A window into what is possible when we reject the politics of division, trade individualism for interconnectedness and prioritize coming together for the greater good.”—Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone

"Reads at once like a moral treatise and a rallying manifesto, a call to reflect and lock arms.”—The Washington Post

Solidarity is often invoked, but it is rarely analyzed and poorly understood. Here, two leading activists and thinkers survey the past, present, and future of the concept across borders of nation, identity, and class to ask: how can we build solidarity in an era of staggering inequality, polarization, violence, and ecological catastrophe? Offering a lively and lucid history of the idea—from Ancient Rome through the first European and American socialists and labor organizers, to twenty-first century social movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter—Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor trace the philosophical debates and political struggles that have shaped the modern world.

Looking forward, they argue that a clear understanding of how solidarity is built and sustained, and an awareness of how it has been suppressed, is essential to warding off the many crises of our present: right-wing backlash, irreversible climate damage, widespread alienation, loneliness, and despair. Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor insist that solidarity is both a principle and a practice, one that must be cultivated and institutionalized, so that care for the common good becomes the central aim of politics and social life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LEAH HUNT-HENDRIX was born and raised in New York City. She has a PhD in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Princeton University where she wrote her dissertation on the Ethics of Solidarity. Leah has founded multiple organizations that have impacted the American politicallandscape. In 2012, she co-founded Solidaire, a national network of philanthropists dedicated to funding progressive movements, and in 2017, she co-founded Way to Win, a network with a similar structure, this time dedicated to electoral strategy. Both organizations are grounded in building solidarity between major donors and grassroots organizing. 
ASTRA TAYLOR is cofounder of the Debt Collective, a union of debtors. She is the director of numerous documentaries and the author of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, and The People’s Platform (winner of an American Book Award), among other works. Her writing has appeared in periodicals including The New Yorker, The New York Times, n+1, and The Baffler. She is an advisor to Lux Magazine and is on the editorial board of Hammer & Hope. She was the 2023 CBC Massey Lecturer.

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Introduction

In 1969, an ambitious and zealous political operative named Kevin Phillips published a book that many now regard as prophetic for its vision of using polarization to fracture and control the American body politic. In The Emerging Republican Majority, the twenty-eight- year-old Harvard graduate detailed what was already becoming known as the conservative “Southern Strategy”—a strategy to secure electoral victories in the South by stoking racial enmity and splitting off white voters. “Considerable historical and theoretical evidence supports the thesis that a liberal Democratic era has ended and that a new era of consolidationist Republicanism has begun,” Phillips observed. The South had been dominated by the Democratic Party since 1877, or the end of Reconstruction, the brief period after the Civil War when the United States government pursued the path of racial and economic equity. Democratic control could be broken and Republican rule hastened along, Phillips argued, by using issues of identity and grievance to pit populations against one another, making questions of platform and policy less central.

A veteran of Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, Phillips was well positioned to influence the Republican Party and the president, to whom his book was warmly dedicated. American voting patterns, Phillips maintained, could be “structured and analyzed” to reveal their logic. “The best structural approach to the changing alignment of American voters,” Phillips wrote, “is a region-by-region analysis designed to unfold the multiple sectional conflicts and group animosities in a logical progression.” Racially and socially polarizing appeals, Phillips predicted, could splinter existing voting blocs and cement conservative victories for generations to come. Phillips did not, of course, invent the politics of divide and conquer; indeed, a century prior, Southern plantation- owning Democrats had successfully deployed such tactics to their own benefit, defending racial hierarchy and fighting back against Reconstruction, setting the stage for the imposition of Jim Crow. But Phillips did help professionalize and normalize the approach. Over a half century after he made his observations, our society remains riven with sectional conflicts and group animosities that a powerful—and bipartisan—elite perpetuate and profit from, financially and politically.

Perversely, rising economic insecurity and ecological instability only further this dynamic. We are living amid a sea change in our social and economic systems, one akin to the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s. The increase in productivity enabled by new technologies, paired with a decrease in taxation of the wealthy, diminished funding for public services, and stagnant wages, has expanded inequality to previously unseen levels. According to a 2023 report by Oxfam, over the last decade, the top 1 percent captured half of all new wealth. And that trend is getting steeper: between 2020 and 2021, that rarefied percentage of the population took home 63 percent of new wealth as the bottom 90 percent gained a combined 10 percent.

While a handful of billionaires can afford to take vanity flights to space and pay top dollar for well-stocked bunkers to ride out cli- mate catastrophes, billions of people live in poverty on a collapsing planet, where forest fires rage and up to one million different species are on the verge of extinction. Sensing opportunity, those in power have responded to our era’s calamities by further exploiting regular people’s vulnerabilities, capitalizing on confusion and resentment, and scapegoating their victims in order to deflect blame away from themselves. The result is a resurgent global right wing, beholden to a corporate elite, steeped in misinformation, and unabashed in their bigotry, with lines of antagonism sharpening around questions of race, religion, immigration status, gender, sexuality, and more—a right wing willing, for example, to spend over $50 million in 2022 on political advertisements attacking LGBTQ+ people, particularly trans children, in order to stir up hate and votes, and to performatively bus immigrants from red states to blue ones, with no concern for their well-being.

Meanwhile, those who claim to represent the political center distinguish themselves by not being as extreme as this right-wing opposition, but they too use division in more subtle ways. For example, they pursue market-based solutions that deepen pre-existing social inequities, advocate for targeted or means-tested government policies that deem some people “worthy” and others “unworthy” of public assistance, and castigate activists for being unreasonable when they argue that safe space be made for members of marginalized groups. Whipped along by a strategy of divide and conquer, liberal democracies the world over appear to be perpetually teeter ng on the edge of social and political disaster, with hard-won social progress being systematically undone.

The premise of this book is simple: shifting away from this tragic course requires the conscious cultivation of solidarity, an understudied concept that must be reclaimed from the history of social and political thought. Fundamentally, we understand solidarity as the recognition of our inherent interconnectedness, an attempt to build bonds of commonality across our differences. It is an ethos and spur to action rooted in the acknowledgment that our lives are inter- twined. Intertwined, however, does not mean indistinguishable— solidarity depends on difference, on recognizing that we are not all exactly alike but that we can still come together and take collective action. It is not unity or sameness, but a way of connecting with others: forging new communities, developing shared visions, and building power to push for social change.

Our actions, policies, and institutions are built on a foundation of concepts and ideas that too often go overlooked in everyday discourse and yet have immense influence over our public and private lives. Solidarity, we believe, is a concept as fundamental to the possibility of democracy as its sisters, liberty and justice; and it is ever more relevant as we fight to make our democracy more egalitarian, sustainable, and pluralistic. But to say that solidarity is the cure to what ails us is the easy part. The challenge is acting on this basic insight and imbuing our social dynamics with a sense of fellow- feeling. It is challenging, in part, because we lack accessible, practical wisdom about solidarity as a political tradition. Nowhere is this truer than in the United States, where American culture emphasizes individualism and personal freedom above all. Beyond certain left-leaning circles where people sign their emails “in solidarity,” the principle rarely appears in mainstream culture or contemporary political discourse.

And yet, despite being undervalued, solidarity has indelibly shaped the modern world. In the chapters ahead, we emphasize the role of solidarity in a particular historical and intellectual tradition that stretches back to the mid-nineteenth century and reaches around the globe, continuing through post–Civil War Reconstruction, labor movements, the creation of the welfare state in Europe and the New Deal in the United States, postcolonial movements for independence, and into the present day—movements that have all, in various ways, fought to expand the bounds of democracy. As this history shows, solidarity requires intentional cultivation; it is not a spontaneous phenomenon. This has only been underscored by recent events, including the Covid-19 pandemic—a phenomenon that exposed our interdependence and vulnerabilities, but that resulted in more distrust and division,...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593686993
ISBN 13 
9780593686997
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
433
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

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