He’s back.

But most people who aren’t baby-brained or blue-pilled saw it coming in the distance.

The Democrats resisted running with, frankly, any vision, causing Kamala Harris to receive 11 million fewer votes last week than Joe Biden did in 2020. With 95% of votes counted, Trump received nearly the same amount as four years ago. So, rather than wholly embracing fascism, the reality is that the American people abstained from liberalism.

The inexplicable thing here is that the Harris campaign started with some semblance of a vision—“brat summer,” “weird,” “we’re not going back”—before playing back the almost completely disintegrated loops titled “Bipartisanism” and “Republicans are our friends, actually.”

Democrats dared the American people to a game of chicken and lost. We (as people, as designers) are playing a similar game: cultural change or ecological collapse. Although all the technology necessary for a sustainable transition exists, we lack the will to turn sustainability from a social anomaly into a social norm. We lack vision. And with the planet, we don’t have the choice to abstain or look away.

Unlikely bedfellows

Think of a popular social movement. Any of them. 1960’s Civil Rights, The French Revolution, The Arab Spring. What did these have in common?

They constructed new social narratives, building them on a foundation of what could be instead of simply rejecting what was. They drew a map so people knew where the movement would take them.

While the climate movement might have been invested in social narratives at one point, the movement in its current state focuses on technical solutions like Net Zero, carbon credits, direct air capture, and solar geoengineering. It doesn’t show people another way to live or visualize what the future could be like. Most people don’t know what these terms mean. Through their vagueness, they depict an uninspiring world that’s essentially the same as the current one: unequal, individualized, and exhausting, but with high-tech ways to create energy and avoid emissions. Technofascism isn’t exactly enticing.

For all the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and generally terrible beliefs that exist on the far right, they do know how to communicate. Their focus on narrative and in/out-groups shows a lot more returns than the minutia and means-testing that the left, or the sustainability movement, for that matter, relies on.

How can we—progressives, designers, climate activists, creative people—co-opt right-wing communication strategies, not to return to a so-called golden era but to improve the world and make the climate movement a social norm?

Text on a background saying, "The Democrats dared the American people to a game of chicken and lost."

Teaching an old dog old tricks

One way is to use a favorite tactic of the far right: solidarity.

Solidarity creates an “Us versus Them,” a memorable mental image that clearly divides good and evil. The right tends to use this distinction to frame Mexicans as rapists, Arabs as terrorists, and trans people as predators. But there are two sides to solidarity.

The typical reactionary solidarity employed by the right reinforces the status quo, keeping things the same as they always were, which often means entrenching control and division and increasing pain, even for those who employ it:

Racism, while it elevates whiteness, is weaponized to erode the welfare and wages that would enable white people to lead healthier, less precarious lives. Misogyny hurts men economically and emotionally, as gendered pay gaps suppress overall wages and through the trap of destructive and often violent standards of masculinity. Transphobia impacts everyone by imposing state-sponsored gender norms and curtailing freedom and self-expression. Ableism, by devaluing and dehumanizing the disabled, dissuades people from demanding the social services and public assistance they need as they cope with illness or aging. Solidarity, 2023; xxxiv

Rather than facilitating regressive change, transformative solidarity shows us a clear path toward progressive change. It tells a story of a better future and helps us visualize the kind of change we can bring by valuing wholeness instead of sameness:

Transformative solidarity must conjure possibility, as much as address an injustice. By constructing an Us to fight a specific and oppressive Them, we commit ourselves to a future where that wrong is righted—a positive vision to accompany the negation. This forward-looking, utopian aspect is key; without it, solidarity is reactionary, reinforces the status quo, or loses steam. This future-oriented dimension works against the limits of the current moment, creating new collective identities—enslaved, peasant, woman, worker, queer, disabled, debtor—and imagining the forms of power these groups can wield. Solidarity, 2023; 73

This idea of transformative solidarity is nothing new. It has been used throughout the past 600 years to create broad alliances: in 1400s post-feudal Europe before capitalism took hold, with late-1800s French Solidarists and pan-Africanists, and in the 20th century with socialist revolutions across South America and Africa (many of which were eventually crushed by US-backed coups, but that’s for another newsletter).

Despite this long history, we’ve lost touch with solidarity, often seeing it as cliché, corny, or naive, especially since the 1980s. Thatcher’s conception—and Reagan’s promotion of the idea—that “There is no alternative” to the market has completely dominated the past 40 years. This idea introduced neoliberalism to the mainstream and repositioned individualism as the ultimate freedom. But by now, it should be clear that individualism that exists without collectivism implies freedom for some, not freedom for all.

Text on a background saying, "Individualized online actions are as easy to ignore as they are to take."

Solidarity in motion

Humanity depends on nature, just like individual humans depend on each other; Elon and Don’s fortunes didn’t appear from thin air, nor did the vast amount of coal, oil, timber, water, wildlife, and vegetables we consume daily. We need to fundamentally change our mindset from seeing the rest of nature less as Them and more as Us. The real Them are those humans who continue to drive us at full speed toward the precipice of planetary boundaries; it is they that we need to have solidarity against on behalf of the rest of nature.

If we give it time, the climate movement will grow in the gap between Us and Them, but we need to fill this gap with collective IRL actions. Individualized online actions are as easy to ignore as they are to take; organizing in-person is harder but shows dedication and builds identity. Designers need to consider what that means inside and outside the creative industry.

One starting point is the labor movement classics: coordinated and thoughtful boycotts, worker-owned coops, and industry-wide unions. Another is finding a commons to build. Solidarity is more likely to be built with these unsexy theories and actions than the commercial output the design industry mistakes as ‘culture’; the aesthetic that grows from those actions is the true culture. If organized people create power, and money often stands in for people, organized people who speak with their wallets are doubly effective.

When various groups join in solidarity, polarization between Us and Them can become a tool for improvement instead of destruction. This doesn't happen automatically because people are in the same situation but because they're led to recognize themselves in others and question the status quo; it has to be cultivated and consciously made. It has to become a lifestyle, not a tagline.

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Unlikely bedfellows

Teaching an old dog old tricks

Solidarity in motion

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