In February, as I waited to meet Astra Taylor at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro, N.C., a few people chanting slogans to protest the war in Gaza rode by on bikes. Moments later, right behind them, a pickup truck drove by blaring country music. Some observers might infer two opposing world views — leftist America, conservative America — each traveling the same way down the same street.
In “Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea,” Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix write about what the idea of solidarity is, and what it means for our future. Hunt-Hendrix, of the Hunt family whose members include oil tycoon H.L. Hunt (her grandfather) and Kansas City Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt (her uncle), is a writer and founding executive director of Solidaire, a network that organizes donors to liberal causes. Taylor, a co-founder of the debtors’ union Debt Collective, is an author and documentary maker whose films include “What Is Democracy?” When Hunt-Hendrix started to sense that problems of solidarity were bound up in the problem of debt, she brought the idea to Taylor, and the co-written book was born.
“Solidarity” reads at once like a moral treatise and a rallying manifesto, a call to reflect and lock arms. The humane and approachable but serious prose — a tidy synthesis of history, polemic and philosophical meditation — feels like a throwback to a shrewder political time than our own. It’s replete with clear, justice-minded appeals for solidarity, but there’s something else humming under the surface, more philosophical ideas pointing the way to the deep humanity implicit in our interdependence.
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Taylor had suggested meeting at the museum in Greensboro, site of the 1960 anti-segregation sit-in protests at Woolworth’s, a bold act of resistance that soon became a larger, ongoing act of solidarity. In the museum, we stood in solemn silence before the lunch counter where four African American college students sat down, politely asked for service and, when refused, politely refused to take no for an answer. It was stirring, and we ended up experiencing its resonances mostly in silence.
Afterward, we made our way to a bookstore to talk about the idea behind her latest work. “I think solidarity is ultimately sort of ineffable,” Taylor told me. “We do try to say it’s materialist. It has to be concretized through courageous action or actual organizations. But there’s still something kind of aspirational and transcendent about it. Solidarity is something that just mostly exists between people. It’s relationships.”
One tricky part of the concept, Taylor acknowledged, is its reliance on an us-vs.-them binary. Every social movement has its antagonists in power, but it’s important, she noted, to see antagonists less as enemies than obstacles to greater political harmony. She noted how forms of reactionary solidarity, like Trumpism, are “not trying to build a broader ‘we’ beyond the people who are already in that identity group.” Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix’s vision, she said, is the opposite, a “transformative solidarity” wherein individual identities merge but don’t dissolve, in the cause of greater economic collaboration, community and shared prosperity.
Later, when I asked Hunt-Hendrix exactly whom this book is for, she told me over the phone that it’s geared toward the left and anyone open to new political ideas, but she had another group in mind, too: those who might consider themselves liberals or centrists — she mentioned journalists Matt Yglesias and Jonathan Chait — who are often critical of the left. As she sees it, “they’re falling into the right’s divide-and-conquer strategy,” and a coalition is “only going to win if we figure out ways to contain all of our parts,” presumably including left-skeptical liberals and centrists.
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Hunt-Hendrix, like Taylor, envisions solidarity as more than just a political program or a redistributionist state. “We have so far to go on economic justice, on economic redistribution,” she said. “But I don’t think that would solve the problem in and of itself. I think there’s a kind of cultural layer as well.”
She recalled her experiences of collective action at Occupy Wall Street in 2011. “It was so powerful,” she said. “You look around and … we’re here together and you just feel bonded with people.” Those weeks of protest felt more profound and useful to her than other attempts at political persuasion she had witnessed, like “ranting or fact-checking or being like, ‘Here’s the data, here are the policies.’”
But the book, otherwise measured in its imploring, really starts throwing haymakers in its critique of philanthropy — or philanthropy, the authors note, that doesn’t acknowledge the wealth-grabbing of its provenance. They write about how this kind of giving might seem benevolent, but its mere existence raises the question (often ducked) of how so few people got so much money to donate in the first place.
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In conversation, Hunt-Hendrix reflected on the problem of philanthropy, both personal and societal, given her upbringing in a very affluent milieu where it’s de rigueur. “I realized,” she said, “you can’t just be critical. You can’t just be a critic when there’s work to do in the world. So, my process for that was going ahead and becoming honest about my own class background and then doing the work of organizing within the philanthropic space to try to get more at the underpinnings of the root causes of economic inequality and power inequality.”
But compellingly, in the book and in our conversation, the authors eventually found their way from politics and wealth disparity to the idea of the sacred, which, they contend, can be secular or religious in origin. Hunt-Hendrix told me how people are looking for not “just political homes but spiritual homes, and that religion and politics, as much as we would like to think that they’re separate, that they’re not integrated, they really are.”
Taylor also reflected on the spiritual dimension of solidarity: “Martin Luther King comes to mind — especially after going to the museum — as someone who brought a theological, transcendent yet highly humanist and socialist politics to the fore.” To further illustrate this eternal kind of solidarity feeling, she invoked the feeling of being in protests. At their most powerful, she said, there’s almost a sense of a “religious revival,” adding how “there are so many times when I’m like, ‘I feel so alienated, I can’t chant with the crowd.’” But when she does, she added, protests “do have a religious quality. It almost feels like an incantation.”
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But soon enough we returned to the subject of the complex and contentious world, the one beneath our feet, where solidarity has to be built on trust, on honoring our fellow human beings, on finding commonality amid difference — and how fundamentally difficult that is. Taylor acknowledged that, yes, we’re deeply divided, things look bleak and we might be a long way from completing bridges — but she suggested that our divisions are not exactly what they seem. “We’re mistaking a crisis of solidarity for a crisis of democracy,” she said.
Nicholas Cannariato is a writer and teacher in Chicago.
Solidarity
The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea
By Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor
Pantheon. 391 pp. $30
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