Politics and protest - The Economist (blog)

"What are you going to do about it?"

WHEN George Orwell, an avid collector of political pamphlets, surveyed the blossoming literary form in 1943, he was unexpectedly unimpressed. “There is totalitarian rubbish and paranoiac rubbish, but in each case it is rubbish,” he wrote in the New Statesman. The war years had generated a rash of writings from all sides of the political spectrum, and Orwell preserved 2,700 of them for the record, including one titled “What are you Going to do About It?” from 1936, by avowed pacifist Aldous Huxley. “The reason why the badness of contemporary pamphlets is somewhat surprising is that the pamphlet ought to be the literary form of an age like our own,” Orwell wrote. “We live in a time when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organised lying exists on a scale never before known. For plugging the holes in history the pamphlet is the ideal form.”

As the same might be said of our own time, it is perhaps unsurprising that the turbulent months of the past year have spurred the publication (and re-publication) of several updated takes on the political pamphlet, not all of them rubbish. The unprecedented victory of Donald Trump has led publishers to rush a selection of like-minded titles to the presses in an apparent effort to comfort and coax shocked liberals out of their post-election stupor, asking, like Huxley, “what are you going to do about it?”

“What We Do Now: Standing Up For Your Values in Trump’s America” is an impressive collection of essays from leading thinkers and politicians of the left, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Gloria Steinem and Robert Reich, as well as emerging voices of a new generation, like Ilhan Omar, the first Somali-American elected to public office. The collection offers eloquent literary and political essays on propaganda and resistance, some new, some old, like George Saunders' 2007 essay “The Braindead Megaphone”, which asks of the media: “How does such a harmful product emanate from such talented people? I’d imagine it has to do with the will to survive.” Several entries provide bullet-pointed plans of action, including Mr Reich’s “100 Days Resistance Agenda” (in short: call Congress, protest, boycott, fundraise, sue, write letters and op-eds) and Ms Steinem’s “Welcome to the Resistance!” which exhorts many of the same strategies. Those who were active during the second election of George W. Bush, in 2004, channel their indignant younger selves. Ultimately, the essays all carry the same message, which is that resisting “means showing up for each other when we come under attack, and showing up for each other when we have an opportunity to advance the cause of justice,” as Cristina Jiménez, co-founder of United We Dream, an organisation of immigrant youth, puts it. The collection’s most important function may be to simply remind readers that showing up has worked before.

That reminder is precisely the aim of the new edition of “Hope in the Dark”, Rebecca Solnit’s 2004 manifesto, which saw a considerable spike in online and in-store purchases after November 8th (Ms Solnit made the e-book free to download immediately after the election). “We can change the world because we have many times before,” she writes in the introduction to the new edition. “We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.” But, 13 years later, it is jarring to read her lament about Bush Republicans moving “from what might be conventionally thought of as right-wing to something a little more totalitarian.” One could hardly have imagined how much further America’s right still had to go. 

Gene Stone, who in 2004 penned the glib “Bush Survival Bible”, featuring lists like “New Drinks to Get You By” and “Ways to Pass as a Republican”, is pragmatic and sobered in “The Trump Survival Guide”, which enumerates the many ways that the new president can destroy progress on civil rights, education, climate change and health care. Like “What We Do Now”, Mr Stone’s new book is prescriptive, listing organisations, books and courses of action for paralysed liberals to embrace. The resulting effect is hardly compelling, reading like a summary of news and opinion articles from the past 12 months. “Unless you remember your high school American history classes, most of this information has probably disappeared from your brain’s memory banks,” Mr Stone writes. The “Trump Survival Guide” accordingly takes the tone of a high-school civics textbook, with correspondingly shallow depth. 

It pales in comparison to the best-informed, and shortest, of these works, “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda”, spontaneously composed and freely disseminated, in the spirit of a true political pamphlet. Written by former congressional aides, “Indivisible” provides both ideological and practical courses of action for “stiffening Democratic spines and weakening pro-Trump Republican resolve,” but it assumes an informed audience, focusing on how liberals can best protect the Democratic agenda rather than attempting to educate readers about what that agenda is. It is a step-by-step guide to local organising, but it is also a call for Democrats to learn from their enemies, to emulate the Tea Party’s grassroots groundswell in order to undo their leader.

In the coda to “What We Do Now”, Dave Eggers describes sitting with a very polite, diverse group of high schoolers in Louisville, Kentucky, three days after the election. Asked to write down their responses to the results, some expressed vitriol, bigotry and fear at each other and their leaders, reactions that seemed completely at odds with their conduct in the classroom. “And so we see how differently we express ourselves on paper,” he writes. “The students, sitting in their oval with the smell of Nepalese samosas filling the room, were unfailingly kind to each other. But on paper, other selves were unleashed.” Humans have many mechanisms of survival in the modern age, and separating one's thoughts from one's public behaviour is one of them (indeed, this strategy is in part why many Trump supporters did not openly disclose their votes, and why many Democrats suppressed misgivings about their party's direction). This new body of protest literature suggests that surviving under the new administration will depend on being loudly, and often impolitely, engaged.

While these titles are hardly political writing of Orwell's calibre, they do provide a sobering view of how the left and its leaders failed in uniting thought and action on a national scale this time around, without omitting past victories. Their shared emphasis on the practical elements of political life—how to call a member of Congress, which organisations to donate to, how to get involved in local politics—are telling indicators of how thinly-spread the unity of thought and action has been in the Democratic establishment, especially after eight prosperous years under the Obama administration. Their authors hope to teach new survival strategies for the modern world to those incensed by Trump's political insurgency. If they succeed, they will have unleashed a spirited and disciplined opposition to the Trump administration.