Hope In The Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
Updated: Aug 8
Written at a particular inflection point in history—the post-9/11 world and the George W. Bush administration’s handling of that cataclysmic event, and the disastrous choices it made in the wake of it—this third edition, with a new forward and afterward, was published in 2016—during another particular inflection point in history: the first Trump presidency. For progressive, populist, leftist, liberal, grassroots, and radical (pick your term) activists, those presidencies—and the wars and policies that spun out of them—felt like real and dangerous and lasting setbacks for those fighting to shape a better world. Solnit writes in the forward, “Your opponents would love you to believe it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win.” But in Hope in the Dark, she makes the case for hope: “Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” And: “Though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance is not enough reason for hope. But there are good reasons.” From there, Solnit walks us through a handful of seismic historical events—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Zapatista uprising, the Seattle WTO protests, 9/11, the global Iraq war protests—to illustrate, and illuminate, the cause for hope with this overarching conclusion: “that radicals have a long, frequently overlooked record of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately measurable, and that the embrace of uncertainty is both more useful and more accurate an assessment than either passive optimism or pessimism and despair.”
I don’t think I’m alone when I say that things feel immeasurably worse when charting the course from Reagan to Bush I to Bush II to Trump I to Trump II—depending, of course, where you fall on the political spectrum, but if you’re reading this review, I think you know where Solnit and I reside. In the in-between times of Clinton, Obama, and Biden, I don’t perceive radical shifts to the left, in terms of enacted policy at least. (While Obama finally delivered some form of universal healthcare, however compromised, Clinton also passed a staggeringly conservative and aggressive anti-crime bill.) On the other hand, I think it’s abundantly clear that the right has shifted radically right both in ideology and enacted policy, though much of what passes for policy in the current Trump administration is simply being done by executive fiat, the Republicans in Congress having abdicated their legislative responsibilities in the hope that they don’t go down with the Trump ship. Americans have also increasingly abdicated their responsibility to be civically engaged and informed, unwilling or unable to sift the wheat from the chaff, fact from fiction, truth from lies. The conservative initiative to “flood the zone,” combined with social media algorithms designed to subvert rational thought and radicalize erstwhile sensible people, has created the least informed, least critical-thinking citizenry, perhaps in our nation’s history. How does Autocracy, or Fascism for that matter, take hold? By first creating an Idiocracy. Trump I? Shame on him. Trump II? Shame on us.
Though there be reason for hope, in 2025 (nine years after this edition of Hope in the Dark was published, itself appearing 12 years after the original printing), it’s hard not to think the door on hope seems to be closing. The time for inaction has passed; it is time for radical action if we want to leave a livable world for our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren. But people see inaction and incompetence in governance, and someone like Trump comes along and says, “I alone can solve your problems. I alone can fix things and make it all better.” And because we’re not paying attention, and our lack of attention translates into a lack of knowledge, we gave him the keys to the castle—not once but twice!—because he has awoken in enough people a sense of injustice and anger at, frankly, all the wrong things (Nixon and Reagan excelled at this). So what do we get? Tariff wars, gutting medical research, abolishing clean air and water regulations, opening more untouched land to drilling and mining, turning away from climate treaties, deportations of undocumented immigrants (and some actual citizens), haphazard firings and rehirings of government employees, an anti-woke culture war as dumb and as far out of the mainstream as the woke one may have been, and so much more. That is not how we get from here to a liveable world for our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren. It is how we tear the world down, how we drive each other apart, how we break things into three hundred and forty million pieces never to be put back together. How on earth can the average American think it sensible for a bunch of billionaires—the single, most out-of-touch cohort imaginable—to run the executive branch? Who can we possibly imagine stands to gain? We, the people, or the billionaires who already own 98%?
And so, when there is darkness upon darkness, it is easy to imagine that darkness begets more darkness. “How do we get back to the struggle over the future?” Solnit asks, and answers, “I think you have to have hope, and hope in this sense is not a prize or a gift, but something you earn through study, through resisting the ease of despair, and through digging tunnels, cutting windows, opening doors, or finding the people who do these things. They exist.” She concludes, “I believe that you can talk about both the terrible things we should engage with and the losses behind us, as well as the wins and achievements that give us the confidence to endeavor to keep pursuing the possibilities. I write to give aid and comfort to people who feel overwhelmed by the defeatist perspective, to encourage people to stand up and participate, to look forward at what we can do and back at what we have done. This book was always for them. And if you’ve read this far, for you.” I’m 51, old enough to know that this cataclysmic moment, too, shall pass, that what goes up must come down, that what goes around comes around, but also, we don’t have too many more cycles like this left before the options available to us begin to narrow exponentially. Each time the right breaks something, it gets harder and takes more time to put it back together, time we are desperately running out of. And this time, Trump’s trying to break everything and get people to believe it was the only way forward. It is a way, but it’s not the only one. And if we think what’s happening is moving us forward, we need to take a good look at which way we’re sitting on the train. Activism comes in many forms. So does resistance. So does change. Hope in the Dark is an invitation to find your place, make your mark, take your stand.
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