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Disasters are everywhere we look: Climate apocalypse in the form of rising sea levels. Prolonged periods of drought. Tens of thousands of catastrophic wildfires that decimate over eight million acres of forest every year. The novel coronavirus, and its lethal disease COVID-19, killing millions and infecting over one hundred million globally. The rise of far-right white nationalists like Donald Trump in 2016. Terrifying conspiracies like QAnon, which imagine a secret cabal of Democrats and Satanists, “the deep state,” working behind the scenes to subvert the Trump administration. Viral videos of Black pain on social media. An unarmed Black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis is suffocated to death in May 2020 by an officer for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, while pleading for his life and yelling for his deceased mother. In August of the same year in Kenosha, Wisconsin, another Black man, Jacob Blake, is shot seven times in the back by another cop as he, Blake, approaches his car and reaches into its glove compartment. In 2020, when the COVID pandemic is at its peak, unemployment reaches double digits, disproportionately impacting working-class citizens of color. Millions are without health insurance. There’s increased hostility with an existing nuclear power—Russia—and the threat of a new cold war. And a dangerously escalating one with an aspiring global power—Iran.
No wonder disaster makes us want to withdraw. To let the storm pass over us. To wait for brighter days. Disaster makes us paralyzed, forcing us into what is familiar. To embrace what’s known. We’re debilitated. Critical reflection is gone. We don’t want to think about politics. Forget about interests, parties, capitalism, history. Anything, really. It all feels beside the point when you’re trying to survive, to avoid doom scrolling through the latest news, ever more horrifying by the day.
Tempting as this pessimism might be, it’s not the only response to disaster. And it can’t be for those who care about justice. Silence is a boon for inequality. Depression, a victory for mass suffering. Disaster can’t control our politics. Nor should it. Especially because when everything appears lost, the battle for the future is waged. Counterintuitive as it may seem, disaster creates unprecedented opportunity to change our world. When all is broken, disoriented, and rearranged—when things collapse, crumble, dissipate, and die and when we need guideposts for something fresh—we can transform society.
Such an opportunity, however, is a double-edged sword. It’s good for you but also for anyone who wants to seize it. Especially the powerful. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would echo a sentiment that became postcard wisdom for policy elites: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”1 A senior advisor to Bill Clinton in 1993, member of the US House of Representatives from the Fifth Congressional District of Illinois, and Democratic mayor of Chicago from 2011 to 2019, Emanuel has, throughout his career, used disaster to institute his centrism. He talked Obama out of demanding a public option for his signature policy, the Affordable Care Act, in 2010 as a way to keep the healthcare industry happy and not alienate suburban white voters. As Chicago mayor, Emanuel was responsible for the largest closure of public schools—fifty—to offset the city’s budget deficits.
In August 2020, as COVID was rapidly changing the world as we knew it, he gave the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, a bit of advice on CNBC: “Two things I would say if I was advising an administration,” Emanuel said. “One is there’s no new Green Deal, [and] there’s no Medicare for All, probably the single two topics that were discussed the most.”2 Indeed, rather than transform American policy in this chaotic moment, Emanuel proposed that nominee Biden use the unmitigated moral disaster of the Trump presidency to change the composition of the Democratic Party’s electorate, to bring aboard as many moderate Republicans as possible. “This will be the year of the Biden Republican,” Emanuel declares. “My view is you don’t want this to be a transactional election. You want this to be the opportunity of a transformational election.”
Emanuel’s views should anger progressives. Why leverage disaster to expand the influence of the Right, rather than transform radically unequal institutions? But Emanuel’s thinking isn’t new. It’s been a staple of reactionary thought for decades. In his 1982 preface to the fortieth-anniversary rerelease of his classic book Capitalism and Freedom, the libertarian economist Milton Friedman famously asserted, “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. . . . Our basic function [is] to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible.”3 Friedman, who first published his book in 1962, couldn’t imagine how successful this approach would be from the 1970s onward. Right-wing disruption common to what we now call the “neoliberal era” of government—to cut public programs, deregulate the banking industry, eliminate the social welfare state, privatize public schools and prisons, crush public- and private-sector unions—has defined the last four decades.
If Rahm Emanuel had his way, we would extend this neoliberal era indefinitely. After COVID-19 left many retail stores shuttered and their employees subsequently unemployed, our prophet of disaster took to the airways once more to offer sage advice to the incoming Biden administration. “There’s going to be people like at JCPenney and other retail—those jobs aren’t coming back. Give them the tools,” Emanuel said. “Six months, you’re going to become a computer coder. We’ll pay for it. . . . We need to give them a lifeline to what’s the next chapter.”4 Job retraining programs. Not unionizing Amazon workers. Coding courses, not a living wage. Jeff Bezos couldn’t have found a better paid spokesperson.
To be fair, Emanuel is right. But not in the way he thinks. Disaster is an opportunity to change the world. This is the first lesson of this book. You can expand democracy for the majority in times of crisis. Luckily for us, there’s a rich history of activists, intellectuals, and artists navigating the treacherous terrain of the unknown and unseen, and living to tell their stories in a new world they both helped create and, at times, never thought would be possible.
They’re the best disrupters of disasters in US history. Not the ones Silicon Valley has in mind. They’re not rich. Or powerful. They often don’t have the ears of presidents and CEOs. And their stories are missing from history books: Indigenous people, poor people, the enslaved, utopians, pacifists, antiwar activists, Black freedom fighters, feminists, queer citizens, hippies, and environmentalists. But they’re the ones who give us the hope so urgently needed today. From them, you’ll learn how to resist successfully, speak emphatically, organize collectively, memorialize ethically, dream poetically, write prophetically, occupy vigorously, build durably, and act decisively.
Many of the college students I teach know very little about these figures. If they do know something about them, it’s romanticized. You know the tired narrative. Once upon a time in the 1960s, there were courageous activists who cared about things fighting for a better world. Now everyone is on social media, crafting the perfect image of themselves, too apathetic about injustice, too cynical to care. Every disaster, my students think, is unprecedented. We can’t do anything about it, even if we tried. Every year we have these same conversations in class. Like clockwork.
But if my students knew history, this history I see played out yearly wouldn’t repeat.
The activists you meet in these pages have suffered from the same anxieties you do. Were told to grow up. To get a job. To get off the street. Perhaps, deep down, my students know they aren’t so dissimilar from the activists who came before them. But they are afraid to admit it. Because if they did, then they’d recognize that they have a choice to start anew.
Hope. The concept may seem old-fashioned. Or it may be the last thing you feel when you’re living through disaster. But hope is the force behind a revolutionary life. Hope motivates you to confront the abyss in the face of long odds and impossible obstacles. This isn’t wishful thinking. Not the innocent kind you see in children’s books. It’s the hope you feel in the dark. You can’t see a better future. You don’t know if you’ll arrive there, ever. You question your intuitions. You’re shaken by your doubts. But without hope, there’s no way out of disaster. Without hope, this disaster—and the next one, and the one after that—will swallow you and everything you hold dear. Hope is like love. You feel grounded in the world. But petrified of making yourself vulnerable by putting yourself out there.
Insist that democracy is, in fact, possible in America, that capitalism won’t rule forever, that climate catastrophe will be addressed in radical ways, that labor will have dignity, that gender identity will be honored. Democracy is as radical as it is necessary. It requires courage. Endless amounts. But if there’s anything the stories chronicled here offer, it’s that democracy, like the hope and love that nourish it, can’t ever be abandoned. Not now. Not ever.