Solidarity for Democracy
“Grasping that [solidarity] is more relational than heroic makes it more possible; as seeing the conditions of other people’s lives as relevant to our own creates ongoing insight and revelation, bringing us closer to reality. Solidarity is a transformative vision of the real.”
— Sarah Schulman, from The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity
Living in a plural society, comprised of culturally diverse peoples, presents many day-to-day challenges that arise in the normal course of encountering people who are significantly different from each other. When that society also purports to be a democracy, the need for mutual recognition—that is the recognition of the dignity and agency of the other—relies on a robust ability to tolerate the stress of difference.1 Even within a mono-cultural democracy (e.g., Denmark2), for the democracy to function, there has to be a critical mass of people who agree that people who are different from the norm are as worthy and entitled to the same rights and dignity. Plural democracy by contrast, where we are constantly moving in and out of various identities and affinities, demands a significantly broader ability to accept and allow the existence of difference and to recognize the humanity and agency of the other we live with. There are not an insignificant number of democratic theorists who doubt that plural democracy is even possible to maintain in the long run—and historically, they have either devolved into civil war and national breakup or into forced assimilation or, as we’re watching in real time in Israel, ethnic cleansing.
In the United States, we face the biggest test of American democracy since the sectionalism that led to the Civil War. Our national democratic culture, the ability to see and allow the dignity and rights of our neighbors and fellow-countryfolk, such as it was, has crumbled; and our democratic institutions still exist, but are no longer functioning to democratic ends. America’s original wounds—slavery and colonialism—continue to ooze the putrid discharge of violent racism and hatred; the founding myth of religious freedom is belied and betrayed by the evangelicals, Mormons, and Catholics of Christian Nationalism3; and class resentment, fear, and frustration have arisen as a giant 'fuck you' to the systems that oppress them.
What has been clear at least since 2016 is the need for people across our various constituencies, cultures, religions, affinities, and values to join together to resist this moment of backsliding and to attempt to set aright our foundering democracy. For the moment, we lack the critical mass of people willing to grant the dignity and rights of all the people around them required for a democracy to work. This is a critical moment for a much broader solidarity work, different from particular groups seeking redress and access and a “place at the table” like the Gay Rights movement or Civil Rights. We need a collective solidarity large enough and powerful enough to change the course of our neo-fascistic turn, to reestablish the bedrock democratic culture necessary for democratic institutions to function. Without this kind of solidarity, we will not be able to successfully resist, roll back, and vanquish Trumpism.
It was from this standpoint five months into Trump’s second turn that I encountered Sarah Schulman’s latest book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. Schulman anchors her argument in the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, and ranges from there to abortion organizing, access to the arts for silenced voices, open admissions higher education, and suicidality among trans folk, in order to make larger points about building solidarity for social change and justice. Thinking about solidarity, collectivism and social belonging within movements can seem contradictory in the context of democracy, which, at least as it is mostly commonly formulated, focuses on the individual’s rights and freedom. But a functioning, healthy democracy maintains a tension — and various democratic cultures have accounted for this tension differently — between our desire for our individual(ist) “pursuits of happiness” and our reliance on communities of strangers to grant us our human dignity, balanced by our responsibility to grant theirs back to them. Democracy is inherently, necessarily a social pact relying on the good faith and benevolence of others. This is also why democracy is so weak to cultural prejudices and hatred (e.g., racism).
Schulman is focused on more traditional pre-fascism justice concerns, which presume the existence of democratic cultures and institutions to appeal to. So her argument for solidarity might seem to be less up to our post-2024 moment (she wrote the essays before Trump’s re-election). But at its heart, Schulman’s description of activist solidarity work come from a place of deep experience and compassion for the humanity of activists, and an understanding of the social and cultural work of creating and maintaining solidarity in the face of inevitable setbacks and failures. Schulman repeats several times in several different ways the baseline assumption that people seeking solidarity must share; this assumption echoes what I’ve described here as the foundation of democratic culture: “…All human beings, by virtue of being born, deserve equal recognition, opportunity, access, and possibility. Anything that disrupts this is unjust.”
Schulman’s vision of solidarity confronts two barriers to forming bonds of solidarity: expectations of (moral, intentional, active) purity and differences of power and inequalities among allies. Both of these tendencies in justice movements can become Achilles’ heels if not attended to, foreclosing the formation of solidarity across difference big enough and strong enough to actually challenge the systems of power that subjugated people face.
The fantasy of solidarity is that it comes from everyone agreeing and having the same motives and purity of action, as well as the expectation of victory in the movement. None of these things, Schulman insists, are real or necessary, and in fact expectations for any of them can sabotage the solidarity from the beginning. “As long as we think of solidarity as saintly, we will not be able to fulfill it. But when our sense of possibility is guided by anticipation of error and contradiction interspersed with great leaps, solidarity becomes at first a realistic possibility and then eventually can be real.”
The strength of her argument across these loosely connected essays springs from her ethical lens, the second barrier of inequalities, where Schulman sees both the oppressed and the activists as fully human. Building solidarity across inequality of comfort and power requires those who come from positions of power and privilege to recognize the “injustice against others, followed by creative, risk-taking acts” that account for the “vast differences of comfort and safety among us” in order to create a movement powerful enough to “transform lives.” This requires radical listening and service to the oppressed, but also creative and independent work on their behalf. It also requires de-centering the self to care for and ensure the well-being of others who are different, sometimes radically, from the self. Schulman’s own life experiences in feminism, reproductive rights, and HIV-AIDS activism lend authority and heft to her vision of solidarity. When she insists that to form real solidarity you must be willing to listen, she cuts to the heart of the matter: “Solidarity is the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter.”
In many ways, the through-line about solidarity feels artificially imposed on arguments about the genocide in Gaza, how lesbian voices have been excluded from the theater, why artistic gatekeeping and criteria are bad, why French racism is its own thing, and how abortion needs to be re-conceived as a collective experience. These various topics too often involve frequent descents into personal pique, sour grapes, aesthetic superiority, and finger wagging; the anecdotes are often only tangentially related to the concept of solidarity and just as often detract from and undermine her otherwise vital theory of solidarity. There is a particular kind of activist who lives in a certainty in their own moral vision, expressed in sanctimonious call-outs and boundary drawing.
This is a strange contradiction in the book where she argues several times for making the boundaries of solidarity as wide and as inclusive as possible, and where she insists that moral conformity and purity are not a requirement of solidarity. And yet at each moment where I would grew frustrated with her digressions, Schulman would bring it back with an incisive observation about coalition building or a piercing and vulnerable self-critique. In another world, Schulman would have taken her ideas about solidarity and composed a single, focused, powerful theory of solidarity, maybe following Audre Lorde’s models of poetic political theory. “Make solidarity doable,” she instructs.
The American Pragmatists of the early 20th century insisted that democracy is not a set of institutions that simply work and can be established in any context, but rather that it is the relationship between a democratic culture (which in practice must always be based on shared and universal human dignity) and institutional democratic procedures (which in practice can vary widely). John Dewey, WEB Du Bois, and Jane Addams all saw democracy as an end-in-view, a destination never reached, a goal never achieved, but which was nonetheless worth the constant effort to move toward. By thinking of democratic culture and institutions both as ends-in-view, directions for constant movement rather than final ends that can be met, Schulman’s solidarity becomes less fantastical and idealistic, and more something that we do because it’s worth doing. As Schulman puts it, solidarity is a practice; and much like any artistic or religious practice, the practice of solidarity is something we engage in every day as an end-in-itself, in order to move us forward toward the democratic society we hope for.
Notes and Bibliographic Do Dads
1. I’m not speaking here of racism or ethnocentrism; just the difficulties that arise in encounters with people who perceive and experience the world differently from each other.
2. You could split hairs about the diversity of Danish culture, such as the immigrant population in Denmark, but there is a vast sociological difference between a society with immigrants and/or subcultures like Denmark, and an immigrant society like the U.S. or Canada.
3. I think of Christian Nationalism more as a cluster of interrelated movements that make cynical use of each other to bring about their quite divergent religious goals, which range from premillenarianist Final Battle apocalypse to establishing an Augustinian City of God to seizing power to create a Christian theocracy for their own cultural dominance.
Addams, Jane. (For example) Democracy and Social Ethics [1902] Champaign-Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Dewey, John. (For example) Freedom and Culture [1939]. New York: Prometheus, 1989.
Du Bois, W.E.B. (For example) Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 [1935] New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Schulman, Sarah. The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. New York: Penguin, 2025.
— Todd
lovingkindness, curiosity, and faggotry
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