Rebecca Solnit: “300,000 people have already died because Elon Musk destroyed USAID”

In Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit (Bridgeport, 1961) denounced how men still lecture left and right, and women listen. Now, in The Unexpected Road (Lumen/Angle), the historian and writer compiles articles on an amnesiac society with many broken people, where an ideology of isolation has triumphed—“in the modern world, we are trained to feel alone, and the oppressors call this loneliness individualism,” she quotes a Taiwanese thinker—which helps deny climate change: thinking that everyone and everything is interconnected is anathema to the current right. She calls for the left to begin to have better narratives about a livable future. And to be able to communicate them.

Today he speaks in Madrid (7:30 p.m.) at the Condeduque Cultural Center. And on Thursday (6:30 p.m.) he will speak at the CCCB in Barcelona.

A classic narcissist “Trump's 'Make America Great Again' means remaking the country of 1958. Sometimes, the country of 1858, before the end of slavery.”

He says he has witnessed changes that would have amazed him when he was younger.

We're in a backlash, although there's something encouraging about that. The right in my country says of the left: "You changed the world enormously. Women, people of color, and queer people have a different status. And we're supposed to treat nature with respect. Well, we want to change the world again." And they speak as if history were a tape that needs to be rewound. Trump's slogan means remaking the US of 1958. Sometimes, the US of 1858, before the end of slavery.

He emphasizes that a lot of poverty has emerged in the US, with many people devastated, but the country has accepted it, forgetting its past.

We weren't Sweden or Denmark, but we had progressive taxes and pretty good social safety nets. And you could live on the lowest wages. Reagan and his revolution changed everything. And because people have amnesia, they don't remember how different things were. Memory is a superpower; people live in a kind of eternal present. And they think people are homeless because of immorality, drugs, or mental illness, but before the 1980s, the phenomenon didn't exist. We have a society of despair and a super-elite never seen before, like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other Silicon Valley monsters. And people don't realize how distorted it is. We're not all the same size, and it's very damaging to democracy.

Go to neo-feudal Silicon Valley.

They're convinced they're superior to everyone else. Because they're good at software or finance, they think they're good at everything and should reorganize society. And they have these horrible visions of the world they want to create, where the rest of us have no power or privacy, and they control and direct it.

The abuser and his wife

Solnit compares the Republican Party to an abuser and the Democrats to the wife who appeases him. “They say, ‘If you do that, you’ll upset the Republicans.’ Then they can use the Constitution like toilet paper, and no one tells them not to because it would upset the Democrats. Diverse people in cities are told they should be nice to those who hate us. And no one ever tells that right-wing rural Christian that they need to spend more time understanding Black feminists. There’s not even a sense that they should respect them. We end up with this mythology about who is a true American, who matters.”

He asserts that an ideology of isolationism triumphs, in which no one is connected to the rest, nor are causes connected to their consequences.

It's a fundamental part of the modern right: ecologically, nothing is connected, so we don't need environmental regulations. And you can pretend people are poor because of their moral character, not because we've created a system where some are trapped in poverty. You deny the consequences and enter into a nihilistic disconnect with a neoliberalism of language where words mean whatever you want.

Authoritarians want power over truth, science, facts, and history, which they see as rival powers. Science and a worldview that stems from Indigenous resurgence instead see a world of profound interconnectedness in which we have enormous reciprocity and responsibility because everything is connected. A happier worldview.

A classic narcissist “Trump’s ideas about happiness don’t make him happy and are destroying the world.”

An isolation that ends up denying climate change.

Now there's no outright denial, but rather the pretense that it won't do any harm. And the Silicon Valley monsters claim AI is so magical it will solve it: we have to burn massive amounts of fossil fuels to operate these giant machines that power their so-called artificial intelligence. Artificial, but not intelligent. Silicon Valley, through cryptocurrencies and AI, has become an enemy of climate action, along with the fossil fuel industry.

He says progressives need a better narrative. Which one?

They have better stories, but what they offer is more complex. The short-term benefit that a minority gains by destroying nature is easier to explain than the long-term well-being of not destroying it. We must move away from the idea that if you have more rights, I will have less. Right-wing stories are based on scarcity. There isn't enough for everyone, so we can't help those who suffer, and 300,000 people have already died because Musk destroyed USAID, the foreign aid agency. The richest man in the world decided that the poorest people on the planet should die from a sense of internal poverty that is really emotional poverty. There is enough, but we have a distribution problem.

We need to stop the hoarding of the ultra-rich. We could have a beautiful world. No child should go hungry. The ideology of isolationism helps the greedy accumulate power and money. But it doesn't make them happy. Trump is a miserable human being, a classic narcissist. As we say in Buddhism, a hungry ghost. He'll never have enough praise, money, attention, or power. Nothing will fill the emptiness inside him. Their ideas about happiness don't make these people happy. They pursue the wrong thing and destroy the world in their wake.