DS: You contrast “transformative solidarity” with what you call “reactionary solidarity.” In light of this latter notion, would you say that the right today is actually better at practicing solidarity than the left, especially given how many elections right-wing nationalists around the globe are winning? What is the lesson that needs to be learned from this?
LHH: Both forms of solidarity take intentional construction, and both involve telling a story about who is the “us” and who is the “them.” The right has been good at this because reactionary solidarity is easier to build than its transformative counterpart: It is based on exclusion, othering, creating an in-group that feels superior to (or victimized by) an out-group. Transformative solidarity requires building commonalities across differences, which is an imaginative and constructive process that takes creativity. For example, the identity of “workers” was constructed as a category that could cover bricklayers and carpenters and pipemakers during the Industrial Revolution. The disability justice movement also created a framework to unite many people with different abilities to collectively advocate for conditions that would meet their needs.
Too often, progressives and liberals want to believe that we can all just get along and so hesitate to identify our enemies. But we think the lesson to learn is that solidarity must be constructed; it is made, not given, and it does involve some form of polarization. We—those who want a world that is just and fair, and who care about our planet and climate change—face serious opposition from people who put personal profit above all else, who claim that the market should know no constraints (even as they fund politicians and policies to bend the market to their will), and who try to divide the rest of us for their own benefit. This was the framework Occupy Wall Street employed: the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, which pointed to the division between the majority of us and the plutocratic class, recently epitomized by investor Bill Ackman and his rampage against DEI, for example, or ExxonMobil’s decades-long campaign of climate denial.
So we hope the book can encourage people to think about how they participate in the construction of collective identities and how we can make those identities more inclusive, creating bigger and broader notions of “us.” But this also means identifying the right opponents.