Solidarity Is Not a Feeling

Let me start with what solidarity actually is, because the way we usually talk about it gets in the way of building it.

Solidarity is not primarily a moral good. It is not a litmus test. It is not a utopian aspiration. It is the mechanism by which movements redistribute risk. And risk distribution is what determines whether people will act.

Every person facing a decision about whether to resist - whether to speak publicly, refuse an order, shelter someone, sign a letter, or simply refuse to pretend - is performing an implicit risk calculation. That calculation is not primarily ideological. It is: What happens to me if I do this? Will I be alone when the consequences come?

The answer to that second question is what solidarity controls.

Authoritarian consolidation is a machine for making that risk calculation come out wrong. The machine works through specific, predictable moves: arrest a few visible people early, to create examples. Use legal and financial pressure to make resistance expensive. Isolate resisters from their institutions and networks. Then let fear do the rest.

The goal is not to suppress every act of resistance. That’s impossible. The goal is to make the individual calculation produce inaction often enough that organized resistance never reaches critical mass. Not everyone has to be afraid. Enough people have to be uncertain that anyone will be there with them if they act.

Properly built solidarity disrupts every stage of that machine. But it has to exist before the crisis arrives, not after it begins. Solidarity assembled under pressure, after someone is already in detention or already fired or already isolated, is emergency response. Emergency response matters. It is not a substitute for infrastructure.

Financial solidarity. Legal defense funds that are pre-capitalized. Rapid-response funds for people who lose employment because they refused to comply. Mutual aid networks that solve the material logistics of showing up. Financial solidarity doesn’t manufacture courage. It removes the material obstacles that make courage impossible. Most people are not held back from resistance by a lack of conviction. They are held back by a concrete, legitimate fear: I cannot afford to lose this job. I cannot afford to be sued. I cannot afford what comes next. When the movement answers that fear materially, the calculation changes.

Legal solidarity. A coordinated network of attorneys committed to rapid pro bono response, built in advance, not assembled under pressure after someone is already in a detention facility or facing a lawsuit they cannot afford to contest. This means relationships built now, retainers arranged now, protocols established now, so that the response is organized before the need is urgent.

Institutional solidarity pacts. Formal, pre-committed agreements among coalitions of organizations that an attack on any member triggers a coordinated response from all. Selective targeting only works when the targeted entity can be isolated. When targeting one organization means triggering 150, the cost-benefit calculation facing the regime changes dramatically. This is why the administration goes after organizations one at a time, quietly, through financial and legal pressure rather than through dramatic public action. The quiet approach depends on the target being alone. Pre-committed solidarity pacts make that approach structurally impossible.

Witness and amplification networks. Organized visibility, so that when someone is targeted, that fact becomes widely known immediately. The regime sets a price for resistance. Our response either accepts that price or contests it. When targeting becomes visible and costly - when it produces immediate and organized public response, documentation, and accountability - the price of targeting rises. When targeting is quiet and invisible, the price stays low.

Psychological solidarity. This one is least talked about and most important over the long haul. Sustained resistance under intensifying pressure produces hypervigilance, grief, burnout, and isolation. Psychological attrition is one of the primary mechanisms by which authoritarian campaigns succeed over time - not by defeating the movement in a single confrontation, but by wearing it down across many months and years until the people who were doing the work can no longer sustain it. The movement that asks people to take risks must also hold them when the risks land. This means regular community, regular acknowledgment, and regular care built into the structure of how we organize, not added as an afterthought when people are already depleted.

The historical record of movements that have survived sustained repression gives us several consistent findings worth naming directly.

Movements that survive are distributed, not centralized. When any single organization can be decapitated and the movement collapses, that was never a movement. It was a campaign. Distributed organizing through networks of relatively autonomous nodes connected by shared frameworks and genuine relationships, rather than by hierarchical authority fails gracefully rather than catastrophically. When nodes are disrupted, other nodes keep functioning. The work does not depend on any single piece for its survival.

Cross-identity solidarity must be built before the crisis that demands it. The time to build a multiracial, cross-sector coalition is not when the raids begin. It is now. The most common failure mode in progressive coalition work is asking communities that have been underserved by the broader movement to take risks on behalf of a solidarity that has not yet been demonstrated to them. Communities that have been disappointed before, that have been used as props for other people’s campaigns and left without support when their own needs were most acute, are correct to be cautious about calls for unity that arrive only when someone else needs something.

The answer to this is not more urgent appeals. It is making deposits before withdrawals. Showing up for communities before you need them to show up for you. Building the trust that makes solidarity real rather than rhetorical, which means doing it over time, through actual shared work, before the crisis that will demand it.

And the message must be rooted in material reality. Hungary’s pro-democracy opposition didn’t win in 2025 by running on democracy as an abstraction. They won on corruption. On healthcare. On economic stagnation. On what sixteen years of authoritarian consolidation had been costing ordinary Hungarians in their daily lives. Seventy-nine percent of voters turned out despite a captured media, a gerrymandered electoral system, and the active intervention of foreign heads of state working to keep the authoritarian in power. And they turned out because the opposition made the material cost of authoritarianism visible and concrete. People do not mobilize to defend institutions. They mobilize when they can see, in concrete terms, what is being taken from them and their families.

Authoritarian consolidation is not permanent. It is not inevitable. It is a political project. Political projects can be defeated when we build the infrastructure to defeat them before the crisis demands it, when we show up for each other across lines of difference before we need anything in return, and when we refuse to let anyone believe they are alone.

The solidarity that will matter most is not what we declare at rallies. It is what is already organized, funded, practiced, and legally prepared on the day it is needed.

That day is coming. The infrastructure has to already exist when it arrives.

Build it now.