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When We Lost

In the past couple of years two great waves of despair have come in—or perhaps waves is too energetic a term, since the despair felt like a stall, a becalming, a running aground. The more recent despair was over the presidential election in the United States, as though, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano commented, George W. Bush was running for President of the World. And he won, despite the opposition of most of the people in the world, despite the polls, despite the fact that a majority of US voters did not choose him—or John Kerry; 40 percent of the electorate stayed home, despite a surge of organization and activism by progressives and leftists who didn’t even agree with Kerry on so very much, despite the terrible record of violence and destruction Bush had accrued, despite the stark disaster the Iraq War had become. He won.² Which is to say that we lost.

The pain was very real, and it was generous-hearted, felt by many people who would not suffer directly but would see that which they loved—truth, their fellow human beings, as the shut-out in the United States or the starving and shot-at in Iraq, the fish in the sea and the trees in the forests—assaulted further. That empathy was generous, and so was the sense of exhaustion—we had imagined taking off the terrible burden that is Bush, and it was painful to resume that leaden weight for four more years. We felt clearly the pain of the circumstances to which we had grown numb.

But the despair was something else again. Sometime before the election was over, I vowed to keep away from what I thought of as “the Conversation,” the tailspin of mutual wailing about how bad everything was, a recitation of the evidence against us—one exciting opportunity the left offers is of being your own prosecutor—that just buried any hope and imagination down into a dank little foxhole of curled-up despair. Now I watch people having it, wondering what it is we get from it. The certainty of despair—is even that kind of certainty so worth pursuing? Stories trap us, stories free us, we live and die by stories, but hearing people have the Conversation is hearing them tell themselves a story they believe is being told to them. What other stories can be told? How do people recognize that they have the power to be storytellers, not just listeners? Hope is the story of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the risk involved in not knowing what comes next, which is more demanding than despair and, in a way, more frightening. And immeasurably more rewarding. What strikes you when you come out of a deep depression or get close to a depressed person is the utter self-absorption of misery. Which is why the political imagination is better fueled by looking deeper and farther. The larger world: it was as though it disappeared during that season, as though there were only two places left on earth: Iraq, like hell on earth, and the United States, rotting from the center. The United States is certainly the center of the world’s military might, and its war in the heart of the Arab world for control of the global oil supply matters a lot. The suffering of people in Iraq matters and so do the deaths of more than a hundred thousand of them, along with, at this writing, more than 1,500 Americans and 76 Britons. This is where the future is being clubbed over the head.

But I think the future is being invented in South America.³ When I think about elections in the autumn of 2004, I think of them as a trio. In Uruguay, after not four years of creepy governments but a hundred and seventy years—ever since Victoria was a teenage queen—the people got a good leftist government. As Eduardo Galeano joyfully wrote,

A few days before the election of the President of the planet in North America, in South America elections and a plebiscite were held in a little-known, almost secret country called Uruguay. In these elections, for the first time in the country’s history, the left won. And in the plebiscite, for the first time in world history, the privatization of water was rejected by popular vote, asserting that water is the right of all people . . . The country is unrecognizable. Uruguayans, so unbelieving that even nihilism was beyond them, have started to believe, and with fervor. And today this melancholic and subdued people, who at first glance might be Argentineans on valium, are dancing on air. The winners have a tremendous burden of responsibility. This rebirth of faith and revival of happiness must be watched over carefully. We should recall every day how right Carlos Quijano was when he said that sins against hope are the only sins beyond forgiveness and redemption.

In Chile, shortly after the US election, huge protests against the Bush administration and its policies went on for several days. Maybe Chile is the center of the world; maybe the fact that they went from a terrifying military dictatorship under Pinochet to a democracy where people can be outspoken in their passion for justice on the other side of the world is indicative too. As longtime Chile observer Roger Burbach wrote after those demonstrations, “There is indeed a Chilean alternative to Bush: it is to pursue former dictators and the real terrorists by using international law and building a global international criminal system that will be based on an egalitarian economic system that empowers people at the grass roots to build their own future.” A month later, Chile succeeded where Britain had failed: Pinochet was put on trial for his crimes. And in a US-backed referendum in August 2004, Venezuelans again voted a landslide victory to the target of an unsuccessful US-backed coup in 2002, left-wing populist president Hugo Chavez. That spring, Argentina’s current president, Nestor Kirchner, backed by the country’s popular rebellion against neoliberalism, boldly defied the International Monetary Fund (IMF).⁴ The year before, Bolivians fought against natural gas privatization so fiercely they chased their neoliberal president into exile in Miami not long after Brazil, under the rule of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, led the developing world in a revolt against the World Trade Organization. South America was neoliberalism’s great laboratory, and now it’s the site of the greatest revolts against that pernicious economic doctrine (which might be most tersely defined as the cult of unfettered international capitalism and privatization of goods and services behind what gets called globalization—and might more accurately be called corporate globalization and the commodification of absolutely everything).

Which is not to say, forget Iraq, forget the United States, just to say, remember Uruguay, remember Chile, remember Venezuela, remember the extraordinary movements against privatization and for justice, democracy, land reform, and indigenous rights in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina. Not one or the other, but both. South America is important because these communities are inventing a better politics of means and of ends. That continent is also important because twenty years or so ago, almost all those countries were run by malevolent dictators. We know how the slide into tyranny and fear takes place, how people fall into a nightmare, but how do they wake up from it, how does the slow climb back into freedom and confidence transpire? That road to recovery is something worth thinking about, because Bush is halfway through an eight-year term, not at the start of a thousand-year reich, so far as we can tell.

For history will remember 2004 not with the microscopic lens of we who lived through it the way aphids traverse a rose, but with a telescopic eye that sees it as part of the stream of wild changes of the past few decades, some for the worse, some for the better. And even 2004 was far broader than the US election: not only did Uruguay have its first great election, but the Ukraine had its electoral upset. Massive voter fraud, dioxin poisoning, media manipulation, and the long arms of the Kremlin and the CIA hardly made for an ideal situation, but the brave resistance, camping out in the streets, chanting and dancing and pushing its way into the parliament, nicely echoed the Central European movements against the then-communist state fifteen years before. More importantly, the nearly one billion citizens of India managed to kick out the Bharatiya Janata Party, with its strange mix of Hindu racism and cultic neoliberalism. Afterward, Arundhati Roy said, “For many of us who feel estranged from mainstream politics, there are rare, ephemeral moments of celebration.” And there is far more to politics than the mainstream of elections and governments, more in the margins where hope is most at home.

This is what the world usually looks like, not like Uruguay last fall, not like the United States, but like both. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” but the summations of the state of the world often assume that it must be all one way or the other, and since it is not all good it must all suck royally. Fitzgerald’s forgotten next sentence is, “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” You wonder what made Vaclav Havel hopeful in 1985 or 1986, when Czechoslovakia was still a Soviet satellite and he was still a jailbird playwright.

Havel said then,

The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

Hope and action feed each other. There are people with good grounds for despair and a sense of powerlessness: prisoners, the desperately poor, those overwhelmed by the labors of just surviving, those living under the threat of imminent violence. And there are less tangible reasons for inaction. When I think back to why I was apolitical into my mid-twenties I see that being politically engaged means having a sense of your own power—that what you do matters—and a sense of belonging, things that came to me only later and that do not come to all. Overcoming alienation and isolation or their causes is a political goal for the rest of us. And for the rest of us, despair is more a kind of fatigue, a loss of faith, that can be overcome, or even an indulgence if you look at the power of being political as a privilege not granted to everyone. And it’s that rest of us I’ll continue railing at—though sometimes it’s the most unlikely people who rise up and take power, the housewives who are supposed to be nobody, the prisoners who organize from inside, the people who have an intimate sense of what’s at stake. You can frame it another way. The revolutionary Brazilian educator Paolo Freire wrote a sequel to his famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed called Pedagogy of Hope, and in it he declares, “Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle. But without the struggle, hope dissipates, loses its bearings, and turns into hopelessness. And hopelessness can turn into tragic despair. Hence the need for a kind of education in hope.”

The despair that keeps coming up is a loss of belief that the struggle is worthwhile. That loss comes from many quarters: from exhaustion, from a sadness born out of empathy, but also from expectations and analyses that are themselves problems. “Resistance is the secret of joy,” said a banner carried by Reclaim the Streets in the late 1990s, quoting Alice Walker. Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don’t depend on them. And if you study the historical record, there have been results, as surprising as Czechoslovakia’s 1989 Velvet Revolution, and there will be more, though they are in the dark, beyond what can be expected. And as Freire points out, struggle generates hope as it goes along. Waiting until everything looks feasible is too long to wait.

This book tells stories of victories and possibilities because the defeats and disasters are more than adequately documented; it exists not in opposition to or denial of them, but in symbiosis with them, or perhaps as a small counterweight to their tonnage. In the past half century, the state of the world has declined dramatically, measured by material terms and by the brutality of wars and ecological onslaughts. But we have also added a huge number of intangibles, of rights, ideas, concepts, words to describe and to realize what was once invisible or unimaginable, and these constitute both a breathing space and a toolbox, a toolbox with which those atrocities can be and have been addressed, a box of hope.

I want to illuminate a past that is too seldom recognized, one in which the power of individuals and unarmed people is colossal, in which the scale of change in the world and the collective imagination over the past few decades is staggering, in which the astonishing things that have taken place can brace us for entering that dark future with boldness. To recognize the momentousness of what has happened is to apprehend what might happen. Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.

2. That the 2000 presidential election was stolen and the 2004 one likely was, at least in Ohio, meant that the fate of the world during those eight years was not the will of the people of the United States, though perhaps it was due to our lack of will to resist these low-impact slow-motion coups.

3. The rise of progressive Latin American governments was a beautiful thing. But after victory comes more change. As Uruguayan political observer Raoul Zibechi noted in 2015: “Progressivism in Latin America, which broke out around 10 or 15 years ago depending on which country you’re talking about, produced some positive changes. But I think that cycle has come to an end. While there continue to be progressive governments, what I am saying is that progressivism as a set of political forces that created something relatively positive: this has ended . . . Progressivism in Latin America stands at a crossroads: either it changes into a political movement advocating real change reaching the structures of society—ownership of land, tax reform targeting the rich—or these governments simply become conservative, which is a process I think has already begun.” It might be added that much of the progressivism of the region was never governmental and isn’t over.

4. South Americans would almost completely banish the International Monetary Fund and its policy impositions from their continent. Between 2005 and 2007, Latin America went from taking on 80 percent of the IMF’s treacherous, conditions-laden loans to 1 percent. The transformation was made possible in part by loans to several countries in the region from oil-rich Venezuela.