Authoritarians like Trump love fear, defeatism, surrender. Do not give them what they want | Rebecca Solnit

Here we are in a crisis in which almost everything we love is going to be under siege in the US in ways that will affect the world in many ways. Most of all this will be because a Trump administration is going to go to war on climate action domestically and internationally – on nature itself and the ways we protect it and thereby protect the systems on which human life depends.

I was asked to talk about hope. First of all, hope does not mean saying this is not bad, and it does not mean saying that we can defeat it. It just means saying we will keep showing up. That we will not give up. That we will assess our powers and weaknesses and recognise that the future we face looks grim, but we do not know how it will unfold, and neither do those we oppose. How it will unfold depends in no small part on what we do. People too often think hope is smiles and sunshine, when it’s fury in the face of danger and oppression, and pressing on in the storm.

But I do not want to talk about hope today, because people so often confuse it with optimism – which assumes everything will be fine – or feeling good, though I’ve long said you can be hopeful and heartbroken, and most of us have had our hearts broken in many ways and are still standing. Hope is not even the opposite of despair, if and when you remember that despair is an emotion, not an analysis. You can feel despair and commit to the hope that the prison-abolition activist Mariame Kaba told us is a discipline. Within you the despair can give way to fury that you have to feel despair, which can itself be the energy to get you out of it. I’m wary about anger – as George Orwell once observed, it’s easily redirected, like the flame of a blowlamp, and it has been in this election as people whose own lives were thwarted economically and otherwise got on board with the scapegoating of immigrants. So it’s something to be careful with. Even so, “rage is a form of prayer too,” as Reverend Dr. Renita J. Weems declared after this terrible US election.

I suspect she means that behind that rage is care, and this is something I have found secular activists often forget – you are angry the children are being bombed or the forest is being cleared because you care about them, so it’s not the feelings about the forces of destruction that is primary. It’s the love, and not losing sight of that is crucial. “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him,” GK Chesterson once wrote, explaining why it’s so easy to lose sight of the prime mover that is love. In some cases. Maga and the manosphere of internet misogyny and racism and crass punching-down having-it-both-ways didn’t-really-mean-it jokes has made smirking cruelty and callousness their brand, and there’s nothing behind that so far as I can tell but ego, ambition and unconsciousness.

Not being them and not being like them is the first job, not just as negatives but as an embrace of the ideals of love, kindness, open-mindedness, the ability to engage with uncertainty and ambiguity, inclusiveness. “Fight on” might sound like a lot now, but maybe you can at least not quit, even if you need to take time off, which is not the same thing as checking out. In stillness and quiet comes the recharging of self and strength, just as in sleep the body rebuilds itself. “Back to work – and notably bucking up the younger people I know with reminders that dignity lies in a refusal to be complicit and that despair ultimately is a form of complicity,” the LGBTQ public historian Gerard Koskovich wrote in a note to me.

I do not want to talk about hope. I want to talk about being resolute and lining up resources, the way people generations ago laid up supplies for winter. Just like the fossil fuel industry loves doomers who give up on defeating it, so authoritarians love fear, surrender, people who’ve decided they’re already defeated, who are already afraid to resist. Do not give them what they want. After the first Trump election Timothy Snyder’s first mandate for facing the coming trouble was: “Do not obey prematurely. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” I’ve half-joked ever since that we shouldn’t obey maturely, either. There will be all too many opportunities for direct resistance, not least offering solidarity and sanctuary to those most under attack, including those who are immigrants, need reproductive rights, are transgender, or have boldly spoken up.

There will be practical opportunities to take care of what you love, including donating, participating, and supporting the ways that towns, counties, states, and public institutions and private organisations can and do set their own policies on everything from energy to education, as they did in the last Trump and Bush administrations. Blue states may become refuges for those from red states – and already have when it comes to reproductive rights – and my own powerful state, California, has again issued a statement of resistance. Remember that in the real map of the election no state is pure red or pure blue – Idaho and Utah are magenta, Vermont is violet, and the rest are shades of purple. Your allies are everywhere, as are your opponents.

There are other kinds of resistance that mean making your own life and your own mind an independent republic in which the pursuit of truth, human rights, kindness and empathy, the preservation of history and memory, of being an example of someone living by values other than the values – if they deserve such a term – of the cruelty, greed, and dishonesty of Donald Trump and the circle around him. This does not overthrow the regime, but it does mean being someone who has not been conquered by it, and it invites others who have not been or who can throw off the shackles to join you.

Finding community, and building and strengthening relationships, with people you trust and agree with about these moral and political issues is also important; it will strengthen you and give you people to act with when it is time to act. The pandemic and the online world have given rise to an epidemic of loneliness, which has crushed a lot of us and made us more susceptible to the worst of what’s out there. The historian Hannah Arendt wrote (back in that era when “men” meant all of us): “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”

By reaching out and creating the conditions for mutual support and encouragement, you become a source of strength to others. When the election outcome became clear to me late Tuesday night, I wrote: “Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the 10tn things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.” There’s a false dichotomy between the popular business of self-care and being engaged and caring for other things; doing the latter can bring you into community with people who are good for you, can help you find that dignity Gerard spoke of, can strengthen and encourage you – and even make you hopeful, because to be around the best versions of human nature does that for you. There will be heroes in the crises to come; look for them. Maybe you’ll be one.

Even reading about heroes can remind you of the sheer perseverance and courage some of us are capable of and maybe make you more capable. We have heroes, from Nelson Mandela to Malala to Václav Havel to the Zapatistas and the poets of Gaza to Thich Nhat Hanh and the Buddhist monks who spoke up against the war in Vietnam to, in the US, Harriet Tubman and Ella Baker and whole nations of Native Americans on this continent who, more than 530 years after the genocides against them began, have not just retained their culture and identity but have reclaimed land, language, rights, power, and public participation in this millennium. My friend (and hero) Julian Aguon, a climate activist and lawyer indigenous to Guam, writes that Indigenous peoples are those who “have a unique capacity to resist despair through connection to collective memory and who just might be our best hope to build a new world rooted in reciprocity and mutual respect – for the earth and for each other”.

If we are going to talk about hope, I would note that, as Aguon says, hope does not come from knowing the future; it comes from knowing the past. Octavia Butler writes: “To try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.” I don’t believe you can foretell it, but I believe you can learn to recognise the patterns, and what the patterns teach is unpredictability: a regime suddenly collapses, an unforeseen revolution emerges from the shadows, public imagination shifts in some profound way because of work done by people who ignored those who told them their efforts were futile and their ideas unreasonable, and public imagination’s shifts lead to new laws and social conditions. I’ve lived through it with the collapse of the Soviet satellite states in 1989, the power of the anti-globalisation movements a decade later, the rise of indigenous leadership in the climate movement, the way the feminist and anti-racist activism of the last decade changed the national conversation and some very practical things.

The study of heroes is one way to ground yourself in memory. The US is an uneasy cobbling together of different constituencies by race, class, gender and culture, and those who have been subordinated have exemplified heroic resistance all along, have given us Geronimo and Frederick Douglass, Ady Barkan and Harvey Milk, Audre Lorde and Grace Lee Boggs. This country has been rich in oppression, which might be why it has also been rich in heroes.

The visionary climate organiser Daniel Hunter wrote guidelines for facing the next Trump administration; one part of his analysis declares: “Distrust fuels the flame of autocracy because it makes it much easier to divide. We can see that in the casual nature of Trump’s rhetoric – telling people to distrust immigrants, Democrats, socialists, people from Chicago, women marchers, Mexicans, the press and so on. This is a social disease: you know whom to trust by whom they tell you to distrust. Trust-building starts with your own self. It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalised.”

His words echo something I learned from Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he wrote: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” It is only by learning to distrust yourself that you come to trust those who are unworthy of it, who are transparently dishonest and self-serving, who offer lies that contradict yesterday’s lies and new promises after breaking the old ones. If it’s not clear yet, I’m talking about building a strong self to face what is to come – how to put that strength to work will emerge as the trouble emerges. Orwell fortified himself by gardening, taking care of animals, spending time in nature, as well as through strong friendships and everyday pleasures. Though he watered his roses, doing so let him turn back to face totalitarianism and the factories of lies again and again even as his poor health morphed into slow death at 46.

I believe this election turned out the way it did in no small part because a large number of Americans are now submerged in new factories of lies more insidious than anything Orwell imagined, and that while the worst of it is the foreign and far-right intentional distortion of reality, too much of the mainstream media has been deferential and will be more deferential to authoritarianism and will not stop letting the right set the agenda about what to be concerned about and what matters. In fact, I don’t have to believe that disinformation is impactful; I know it because it’s been documented. The data group Ipsos reports: “Americans who answer questions about inflation, crime, and immigration incorrectly are more likely to opt for Trump, while Americans who answer those questions correctly prefer Harris.”

Many mainstream media voices will urge us to make peace with people who want to make war on us, to find compromise as if the space halfway between truth and lies is a good destination, to make nice with atrocity, because they’ve been doing that energetically at least since 2016. I believe in leaving the door open for those who might join us, and in finding ways to reach out and invite in, but that is compatible with standing on principle, and the strength of that stand can itself be a convincing argument in ways compromise does not.

The outcome of this election is the result of disinformation and the rise of a huge rightwing media industry, both as enterprises like Fox and Newsmax but also the hordes of blogs, podcasts, Russian-produced propaganda on social media, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, online subcultures of misogynists and white supremacists and the rest. Finding and sharing good sources of information is part of the job. One response I saw after the election was a kind of panicky plan-making: they are going to do this and that and we have to do this and that, or we cannot win because I have decided this is the scenario. But as Roshi Joan Halifax, the abbot of Upaya Zen Center, said to me, echoing classic Buddhist teachings: “We all live in radical uncertainty” all the time, adding: “Certainty is a way of feeling safe but it’s not how reality operates.” We know their values, we know the announced agendas. But what is to come will be chaos. Trump seems in mental and physical decline and never had principles, just a churning, conflicting bunch of hates and cravings and misunderstandings and no concern for anything but himself. In the campaign, for example, it was clear he could not grasp how tariffs work, and his obsession with the fictitious character Hannibal Lecter seems to be because he conflated insane asylums and refugees seeking asylum. He is vengeful, incurious, self-serving and incompetent and is surrounded by ruthlessly ambitious men, starting with JD Vance and Elon Musk, who have their own agendas. One thing we learned about Maga-world during the first Trump administration is that corruption and ambition override loyalty, or rather there was none. There will almost certainly be a lot of backstabbing and throwing of each other under various buses.

No one can deal with every issue at once, and choosing which part of the problem to commit to is part of the work of resistance. Some of you are already doing important work on human rights or climate or criminal justice. Some of you can commit to addressing immigration or the underground railroads for abortions. Some of you will find your commitment or have skills and resources to bring to multiple issues. Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest turned anti-war organiser, once wrote: “One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something; and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.”

We do not know what will happen. But we can know who we can commit to be in the face of what happens. That is a strong beginning. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving. Let Julian Aguon have the last word: “No offering is too small. No stone unneeded … All of us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of the world.”