A Call to Resistance

Finding my footing after the election

*warning, there will be expletives in this piece.
Today was a tough day. But for all the grieving and reflecting on where things went wrong and the national political period awaiting us over the next four years, I personally have to find something to keep me going. And so this piece is less of a diagnostic of the wrong rather than a call to action.

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It's a little funny because I was going to write a version of this piece right after COP16. During the conference, I was reminded that global and national environmental ambitions are in no way aligned with local realities. And so I sighed in resignation.

WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO IF THE VERY DIPLOMATS AND POLITICIANS RUNNING THE WORLD AND CONTROLLING ITS RESOURCES DON'T CHANGE?

My internal struggles, exemplified by Capital Moves Faster than Community, often lead me see institutions of power as the only mechanisms of change.

• If we can't have a timely revolution, maybe I should work with ESG investors to green portfolios and try to move billions of dollars of capital.

• If my work to defend one territory from environmental extraction does not prevent the extraction of my neighboring community, maybe I should consider trying to change the business model of capital from within to be "less bad".

• In the case of COP16, maybe I should invest more energy in trying to understand and influence the national policies and international finance flows of capital that affect biodiversity protection and climate action across broad swaths of territory.

I still believe this institutional building work is necessary. The hope of most pragmatic activists, I believe, is to create lasting institutions that protect the values of justice that they began fighting for at the local level.

• The Civil Rights movement and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

• The Sunrise Movement and the Inflation Reduction Act (which has invested trillions of dollars in climate action).

We need political wins.

But at times, the system fails us and huge movements don't materialize into political institutional change. How many people can argue that the movements of Occupy Wall Street in the U.S. drastically changed policies to improve banking policy and reduce inequality? Or that the Arab Spring movements of the 2010s resulted in liberal democracies for much of the Middle East?

The election of Donald Trump and a Republican Senate and House (and more conservative Supreme Court), to many of us, signals the doom of the institutional protection we fight for on a daily basis--for climate action, for women's reproductive rights, for trans rights, for migrant rights, for a juster, fairer economy that treats workers with dignity and companies with accountability.

And so things are bad. Things will be set back. People have lost lives (see the case of Post-Roe abortion rights) and will continue to do so as a result of this administration. But if our institutions fail us, we can't resign ourselves to four years of complaining at cocktail parties and complacency as we doomscroll on X while watching a new Netflix show. We need to act.

As I said before, I wanted to write this after COP16 because of my conversation with Paloma from

Unbracketing the possible

. In response to my doom and my belief that political and economic power through institutions was the only way to produce systemic change, she reminded me that institutional power is no silver bullet for the problems facing us. For all the benefits from the IRA, the U.S. is producing more oil and gas than ever in its history.¹ That for all the voting rights protections we've enshrined, many states continually tighten rules "for election integrity" that in reality make it harder to vote for minorities.² That a Democratic President and Senate has funded most of the Israeli government's genocide against the Palestinian people in the last year.³

Institutions are important. But they won't save us.

As Paloma reminded me, it is a privilege to believe in institutional systemic change on the political and economic level. Because for many people, the "resistance" is a daily fight for survival in an existential state of crisis. In war torn countries, from Sudan and Congo to Palestine and Myanmar. For indigenous communities in Latin America and Africa facing extractive mineral and oil, gas, and mineral mining projects that pollute their air and water.

There are always crises. People will always be dying, and people will always be fighting. Utopia isn't something that you arrive at. It's the sunrise on the horizon, always guiding you in a direction that you try to reach in choppy seas.⁴

The sunrise at El Cabo de la Vela, La Guajira.

My Call to Action

Do something. Local. There's a reason why so many Americans don't believe in our democratic and economic institutions. Why people feel forgotten and think that Trump as a "political outsider" can change things for the better. Why people scapegoat immigrants rather than attribute hardship to the broader economic forces of globalization that have gutted industrial communities.

Look at X, Instagram, Facebook, any community group, and you’ll be sure to find something. Or, if you’re not sure, reach out to one of your politically active friends in the same area as you.

From @Kendramorous on (ironically, Elon Musk’s) X.

from @mbrnn0

When institutions don't serve us, fighting the daily crisis is the only chance we got.

Being in community is the only salvation. There's no one way to change things--it might be working on community gardens, volunteering at after-school education centers, starting mutual aid networks, trying to coordinate resources to under-funded community activists, but there's always work to be done. There's always a fight to be had. And in that fight, in the company of our fellow human beings, may we find liberation.

My call to action, is that we don’t lose hope of institutional change, but that we constantly strive for utopia by exercising our imagination to improve the local present.

I found inspiration in Ezra Klein’s candid interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book, The Message. In the interview, Coates reflects on what traveling to the Israeli settler occupations of the West Bank and the fight for civil rights in America has taught him about political imagination.

ta-nehisi coates

"I have had a long and really contentious relationship with the idea of nonviolence among African Americans. OK? We have endured so much violence from this country. Just so much. I mean, kids shot down. The Civil Rights movement is just a catalog of violent acts committed against Black people.”

However, Coates notes that

We never had the luxury of saying that the violence of white racism and the violence of white supremacy somehow destroyed our movement. It’s just not an option. And so I question your commitment to justice, to democracy, if it can’t endure this."

Klein notes that institutional solutions are sometimes impossible, and that the present “now” is sometimes all we got.

ezra klein

"When I just did this episode with David Remnick, and one of the things I said, which I’ve said before, is like, I always try to just like move this conversation over two-state solutions and one-state solutions off. And I saw a bunch of people say no, that’s a dodge. Like, that’s a luxury.

And I don’t mean it that way, or I don’t agree with that interpretation of it. I don’t think a solution right now is possible. And I think debating them allows us to put ourselves in this slightly heroic role that makes it so by imagining some future radically, radically different situation, we don’t have to apprehend the one we’re in right now."…

But in the daily act of resistance, we find our humanity.

ezra klein

I was at the Western Wall. There is something there that’s almost hallucinatory in its vividness…

ta-nehisi coates

I totally got it. Look, man, I was there day five. I was like, when can I leave? When can I leave? And then I left on day 10 and two days after I got back here, I was like, when am I going back? It was fatiguing, horrific, harrowing. Some of the best food I’ve ever had in my life. And I don’t say that to be trivial. I say that to, again, recognize this idea that they were actually people there, living there, creating a culture, doing the things that human beings do.

As I understand it, we need to be constantly stepping between the present crisis and the future utopia. We have to think about the consequences for democracy, world peace, and economic social justice for the next four years. But we must not forget our responsibility to act in the present.

To the resistance in however we find it,

Rishab

1. https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/production/#oil-tab

2. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/3/purging-voters-inside-republican-efforts-to-restrict-2024-election-vote

3. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael; https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts;

4. Certainly butchering how Paloma elegantly put it but you get the point.

Also, recommend reading

Felicia Wang

’s new post, https://substack.com/home/post/p-151299895.