immanence

The best context for thinking of yesterday’s “Hands Off!” protests, held across the United States and in cities around the world, is the one Rebecca Solnit gets at in her post of this morning on Meditations in an Emergency. It is the global context described here:

“Right now Ukrainians are fighting for their freedom; Bangladeshis and Syrians are figuring out what comes after toppling an authoritarian regime; huge crowds are protesting in the streets of Turkey, Hungary, Serbia, the Republic of Georgia; Chile is governed by a young president who rose to prominence in student protests against a right-wing regime. South Korea just impeached and deposed a president who attempted a coup; the dictatorial former president of the Philippines is under arrest by the International Criminal Court for his human rights abuses. Across the world, time and time again, civil society has taken history into its own hands and written a better ending to an authoritarian story. Now it’s our turn.”

Unlike what right-wing media will be spinning for its followers, the protests are not just “woke America” lashing back for the Trump administration’s “cultural” policies (abortion, immigration, DEI). They are part of a very broad, very global, and very much a people’s movement, one that’s not being led at all by political parties. (Democratic Party leadership has been hardly visible amidst the 1200+ protests held across the US yesterday). And the goals are shared across the world: they are freedom, democracy, human rights, and — while less visible in Solnit’s post, but audible in the calls for “hands off science,” “hands off our national parks,” etc. — ecology.

Solnit offers another important reminder:

“All this is happening because American voters stayed home. Trump got 31% of the vote, just a hair more than Kamala Harris, and 39% stayed home. A tiny bit more turnout, a tiny bit more participation, a tiny bit more concern, and we would not be here today, because those criminals would not be in the White House. We slept through the threat to our democracy, too many of us, but the destruction is waking a lot of people up. Stay awake.”

Solnit has emerged as one of the top U.S. spokespeople for this movement, alongside Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder, and others (see my Trump 2.0 Critical Resource List for some of the others). And the infrastructure of independent media that’s being shared across platforms — using social media such as Substack, BlueSky, Facebook (inevitably, even if always ambivalently), and others, but not being used by them — is emerging as the glue that connects the movement together.

The U.S. mass media is feeling cowed by the authoritarians (Kat O’Brien’s point, cited by Solnit, is correct that the major U.S. liberal media are downplaying the event, for fear of being targeted by the Trump-Musk regime), but they will come around.

Solnit’s entire piece is well worth reading.