Why we can't see progress | The Gray Area

TL;DR

Rebecca Solnit argues we fail to recognize real progressive gains because of cultural amnesia, media distortion, and a left-wing habit of catastrophizing.

Key Points

• 1.Amnesia prevents us from seeing change. To perceive progress, you need a timeframe as large as the change itself — people who don't remember pre-second-wave feminism can't recognize how much the status of women has shifted.
• 2.Right-wing and mainstream media distort our sense of the majority. Solnit argues anti-vax, anti-immigration, anti-reproductive rights, and anti-trans groups are actually a minority made to feel like a majority, leaving progressives feeling powerless and isolated.
• 3.The backlash itself proves the gains were real. Solnit's core argument is that the anger and fear from the right — the 'supernova' of Trumpism — is a direct response to 70 years of successful progressive change in civil rights, feminism, queer rights, and environmentalism.
• 4.The Gramsci aphorism structures the book's thesis. 'An old world is dying, a new world is struggling to be born — now is the time of monsters.' Solnit says people fixate on the dying old world and the monsters, but miss the new world being born.
• 5.The right's ideology of isolation underpins its rejection of climate science and interdependence. If nothing is connected, there are no consequences to individual action — this nihilism protects unfettered capitalism, male dominance over women's bodies, and environmental destruction.
• 6.Cultural story-change preceded legal change on LGBTQ rights. The Supreme Court's 2015 marriage equality ruling wasn't possible without decades of queer people coming out, shifting what was considered 'normal' — legislation followed culture, not the other way around.
• 7.Roe v. Wade's overturn doesn't mean feminism failed. Solnit notes that during the same period, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, and Ireland all granted reproductive rights; abortions have actually increased partly due to medication abortion by mail; and you can remove a legal right but not the belief in that right.
• 8.The left's perfectionism and in-group policing undermine coalition building. Solnit cites Yo Maron's essay: 'If the left doesn't believe it can win, all it can do is be perfect,' leading to punishing impure members rather than welcoming people leaving MAGA.
• 9.Comfort with uncertainty is a political virtue. Borrowing from Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, Solnit argues that intolerance of uncertainty drives both doomerism and authoritarian thinking; uncertainty is another word for possibility, and 'categories are where thoughts go to die.'