The first thing to remember about the damage done by the US supreme court this June and the June before is that each majority decision overturns a right that we had won. We had won a measure of student debt relief thanks to the heroic efforts of debt activists since 2011. We had won reproductive rights protection 50 years ago with Roe v Wade, and we won wetlands protection with the Clean Water Act around the same time. We had implemented affirmative action, AKA a redress of centuries of institutionalized inequality, step by step, in many ways over the past 60-plus years. We had won rights for same-sex couples and queer people in a series of laws and decisions.
What this means is that the right wing of the US supreme court is part of a gang of reactionaries engaging in backlash. It also means we can win these things back. It will not be easy, but difficult is not impossible. This does not mean that the decisions are not devastating, and that we should not feel the pain. The old saying “don’t mourn, organize” has always worked better for me as “mourn, but also organize”. Defeat is no reason to stop. Neither is victory a reason to stop when victory is partial or needs to be defended. You can celebrate victories, mourn defeats and keep going.
Each of those victories was hard-won, often by people who began when the rights and protections they sought seemed inconceivable, then unlikely, then remote, and so goes the road of profound change almost every time. To win environmental protections, the public had to be awakened to the interconnectedness, the vulnerability and the value of a healthy natural world and our inseparability from it. To win marriage equality for same-sex couples and equal protection for queer people involved changing beliefs, which was achieved not just by campaigns but by countless LGBTQ+ people courageously making themselves visible and audible in their communities.
To recognize the power of this change requires a historical memory. A memory of rivers catching fire and toxic products being dumped freely in the 1960s. Of laws and guidelines treating queer people as criminal or mentally ill or both in ways that terrorized them and made them largely invisible to the public eye. Of women dying of or damaged by illegal abortions or leading the bleak lives to which unwanted pregnancies consigned them. Of the way the Ivy League universities in particular were virtually all white and all male into the 1970s. Of how inequality was so normalized that first people had to see and believe that women and Bipoc people should have equal rights and access to and a role in the places of power that decide the fate of each of us, the nation and the world. All that changed – not enough, of course, but a lot.
Memory is a superpower, because memory of how these situations changed is a memory of our victories and our power. Each of these victories happened both through the specifics of campaigns to change legislation but also through changing the public imagination. The supreme court can dismantle the legislation but they cannot touch the beliefs and values. We still believe in these rights. We still recognize the harm and the destruction they were meant to prevent. If you didn’t believe that equal access and rights were wrong yesterday or last year, you don’t have to believe it now. Not just because those rights were denied by six justices, at least four of whom are so utterly corrupt in how they got their seats or what they’ve done while seated that they should be forced to resign.
Last year’s attack on reproductive rights has produced its own backlash, with many states working to protect those rights, many elections seemingly pivoting on voter outrage about the Republican party’s brutality toward and hatred of women, and Republicans scurrying away from their own achievement and its hideous impacts. If the Republican party deserves admiration for anything, it’s for their long view, understanding of strategy and tenacity.
The building up of an illicit rightwing supreme court took many years, and took fundamentalist Christians holding their noses to vote for Donald Trump because they understood that meant getting the justices to overturn Roe v Wade. It meant building power from the ground up to take state legislatures to gerrymander electoral maps and sticking vicious clowns like Jim Jordan into bizarrely tailored districts. It meant chipping away at voting rights, achieved in part by the supreme court’s attack on the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and its 2010 Citizens United decision that let a filthy tsunami of corporate dark money into electoral politics, thereby overturning two of its own earlier decisions.
While each of the issues under attack need their own campaigns, voting rights and free and fair elections are crucial to all of them. Don’t forget that the only reason we have such a conservative government, including the supreme court, is voter suppression. If we truly had equal access to the ballot, American voters would choose more progressive candidates and pass more progressive legislation. That’s why what the public wants, believes and values so often differs from what the politicians chosen by dark money and voter suppression give us.
One of the striking features of recent years is the baldfaced Republican effort to prevent Black people in particular, but also young, poor and other non-white demographics from voting. Baldfaced because it acknowledges that they are unpopular and that they’ve given up the goal of being in power because they represent the majority. As they become more marginalized through their own extreme and unpopular views, they have to use more extreme means – now including trying to steal and overturn elections – to hold onto power.
This is as true of climate action as anything else: a new Yale 360 poll shows that “57% of registered voters support a US president declaring global warming a national emergency if Congress does not take further action” and “74% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.” The problem isn’t the people. It’s the power, and history shows us that when we come together with ferocious commitment to a shared goal we can be more powerful than institutions and governments. The right would like us to feel defeated and powerless. We can feel devastated and still feel powerful or find our power. This is not a time to quit. It’s a time to fight.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
