If we don’t prioritize solidarity, this harmful and anti-democratic challenge will succeed. Way over only a slogan or hashtag, solidarity can orient us towards a future price preventing for, offering the premise of a reputable and galvanizing plan for democratic renewal. As an alternative of the Twentieth-century perfect of a welfare state, we must always attempt to think about a solidarity state.
We urgently want a countervision of what authorities can and ought to be, and the way public assets and infrastructure may be deployed to foster social connection and restore the social cloth in order that democracy can have an opportunity not simply to limp alongside, however to flourish. Solidarity, right here, is each a purpose price reaching towards and the strategy of constructing the ability to realize it. It’s each means and ends, the forging of social bonds in order that we are able to turn out to be robust sufficient to shift coverage collectively.
Traditionally, the query of solidarity has been raised throughout risky junctures just like the one we live by way of. Modern conceptions of solidarity first took kind after the democratic revolutions of the 18th century and over the course of the Industrial Revolution. As kings have been deposed and the church’s function as an ethical authority waned, philosophers and residents puzzled how society may cohere and not using a monarch or god. What may bind individuals in a secular, pluralistic age?
The Nineteenth-century thinkers who started severely considering and writing concerning the concept of solidarity typically used the picture of the human physique, the place totally different elements work in tandem. Most famously, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim put solidarity on the heart of his inquiry, arguing that as society elevated in complexity, social bonds between individuals would strengthen, every individual enjoying a specialised function whereas related to a bigger complete. Solidarity and social cohesion, he argued, can be the pure results of growing social and financial interdependence. However as Durkheim himself would ultimately acknowledge, the economic financial system that he initially imagined would generate solidarity would truly serve to weaken its fragile ties, fostering what he known as anomie, the corrosive hopelessness that accompanied rising inequality.
In the US, solidarity by no means achieved the identical mental cachet as in Europe. Since this nation’s founding, the idea has typically been uncared for, and the observe actively suppressed and even criminalized. Makes an attempt to forge cross-racial solidarity have met with violent suppression again and again, and labor organizing, successfully outlawed till the New Deal period, nonetheless occupies hostile authorized floor. A long time of market-friendly insurance policies, promoted by Republicans and Democrats alike, have undermined solidarity in methods each refined and overt, from encouraging us to see ourselves as particular person customers somewhat than residents to fostering individualism and competitors over collectivity and cooperation.
