20:80 Guide — Companion Reading

Doomsaying as Disinformation

Drawn from Rebecca Solnit's essays, 2023–2026  ·  Why confident predictions of defeat demobilize the people whose action decides the outcome

---

Why reconsider the despair we so often feel about the prospects for democracy and real progress toward liberty and justice for all?

1. Because no one can know how this ends. Certainty about defeat is unearned, and history shows decisive change arriving from places few were watching.
2. Because doomsaying works as disinformation: confident predictions, often outdated or unsourced, that demobilize the very people whose action decides the outcome.
3. Because despair is an emotion, not an analysis. Feeling heartbroken is legitimate, but surrendering in advance is a choice that hands power to authoritarians and vested interests.

---

The Case in Brief

Rebecca Solnit draws a line between a warning and a prophecy. A warning carries the premise that action can prevent the feared outcome. A prophecy treats the future as settled and removes the reason to act. Confident predictions of defeat, repeated across social media and often built on outdated or missing information, function as prophecy. The prediction itself lowers participation, which makes the predicted outcome more likely.

The sections below collect the supporting points, evidence, and short quotations from Solnit's 2023 Guardian essay, her Meditations in an Emergency newsletter (2025–2026), and a November 2024 Guardian essay she later reposted. Quotations are short and verbatim; everything else is paraphrased. Superscript numbers are footnotes — click one to jump to its source, then click the title to open the original.

---

Key Points and Evidence

1. The future is unwritten

• Trends last only while the beliefs, values, and systems behind them last. Solnit's formulation: "Trends hold when beliefs, values, and systems hold."⁸
• Her examples of forces dismissed or invisible shortly before they changed everything: the nonviolent movements that helped topple East Bloc regimes in 1989; the Zapatistas, who emerged in 1994; the abolition movement, scorned in the 1830s and 1840s yet mainstream within a few decades; and the renewable-energy revolution. Early in the 1850s the trend appeared to favor a more pro-slavery United States; by the end of that decade the country had elected Lincoln.⁸
• The 1960s "population bomb" forecast assumed high birthrates would continue. Growth instead declined and agricultural yields rose, and the concern has since flipped to an aging population and labor shortages. A forecast built on "the present, only more so" failed.⁸
• Technology adoption follows S-curves. Solnit cites Carbon Tracker: solar panels, wind turbines, and lithium-ion batteries each fell in cost by over 90% in two decades, with adoption accelerating once past a tipping point. Change is often exponential or unpredictable rather than linear.¹
• Solnit reports that Hungary's Viktor Orbán lost power in a surprise defeat in 2026, and argues that those who assumed authoritarianism could only expand should adjust.⁹
• Confidence in omnipotence is itself a miscalculation. Citing Hannah Arendt on leaders who believe everything is possible, Solnit argues that authoritarian power rests on the cooperation and alliances such leaders are busy severing, and that no one knows how the story ends.⁶
• In November 2025 she describes Republicans, "assumed by themselves and too many others" to be unstoppable, being stopped repeatedly within a few weeks, through elections, congressional defections, and mass public protest.⁵

2. Doomsaying demobilizes — and the demobilization is the harm

• Announcing that the outcome is already decided strips away the motivation to participate, and doing nothing settles for the worst outcome. Solnit: doomers are "surrendering in advance and inspiring others to do the same."¹
• Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, quoted by Solnit, said many climate scientists had recently spent more time arguing with doomers than with deniers. Solnit adds that deniers are mostly on the right, which is already committed to inaction, while doomers discourage people who otherwise might act.¹
• Susan Collins example: cynics insisted Collins would never vote no on the 2025 budget bill, which also told people not to bother calling. She voted no, which Solnit attributes to constituents who acted without assuming the outcome. The bill still passed on a tie-breaking vote, which Solnit takes as evidence that more participation might have changed the result. Her principle: "the future is being made in the present."³
• Trump power example: after a constitutional law professor explained that a president cannot ban mail-in voting by executive order, commenters insisted his power was unlimited. Solnit cited a lawsuit tracker, which on August 8, 2025 showed 110 executive actions partly or fully blocked, 74 left in effect, and 90 pending. For a partial current picture, see the Ballotpedia multistate lawsuits tracker — but note it covers only multistate AG coalitions, not the hundreds of additional suits filed by Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, NAACP LDF, Marc Elias's firm, and others.⁴
• Why the sidelines are comfortable: Solnit argues that cynical and defeatist postures excuse and justify staying on the sidelines, and that people who prophesy defeat rarely return to admit error, since they move on to prophesying the next defeat.³

3. Why this counts as disinformation

• Confidence without information: Solnit describes a public that speaks of climate with "a strange combination of confidence and defeatism," confidence resting on inaccurate, outdated, or no information. Her line: "Outdated information is misinformation."¹
• Doom claims spread because "doom evangelists" flourish online even after reputable scientists demonstrate their errors. Mark Jacobson of Stanford, quoted in the piece, asked why those who do not study 100% renewable systems keep saying it cannot be done when those who do are unanimous that it can.¹
• Specific false premises Solnit rebuts: that the public does not care (surveys cited in 2023: 69% of Americans favor carbon neutrality by 2050; 75% of British adults worried about climate change) and that the media is not covering it. A 2024 Oxford/UNDP Peoples' Climate Vote survey of more than 73,000 people in 77 countries found 80% want stronger government climate action and 86% want countries to work together. The belief that most people do not care feeds helplessness.¹¹⁰¹²
• She names the underlying habit: discomfort with uncertainty that shows up as "false certainty about the future."¹¹
• Disinformation and democracy: in her November 2024 essay she cites Ipsos data that Americans who answered questions about inflation, crime, and immigration incorrectly were more likely to prefer Trump. She also argues that authoritarians love fear and surrender and the fossil fuel industry loves doomers who give up. Timothy Snyder's rule, which she quotes in several essays, is not to obey in advance: premature compliance teaches power what it can do.²⁷⁴
• Her stance on the unknown, from the newsletter's own banner and the 2024 essay: "we do not know how it will unfold, and neither do those we oppose."²¹⁴

4. Despair, hope, and what to do instead

• Feelings versus forecasts: "despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis." Feelings deserve respect as feelings, but they inform only about the person feeling them, not about outcomes.¹
• Hope is not optimism or mood. It is "a commitment to search for possibilities," and it coexists with heartbreak. Gramsci's phrase, as she cites it: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.¹
• Fighting the narrative is itself action: "fighting defeatism is also climate work." The same logic applies to democracy work.¹
• Radical uncertainty: Roshi Joan Halifax told Solnit that certainty is a way of feeling safe but not how reality operates. Plans built on a decided scenario are fragile; commitments about who to be are not.²
• All-or-nothing framing is a trap. The fact that not everything can be saved does not mean nothing can be saved, and everything that can be saved is worth saving.²¹⁰¹¹
• Words shape reality. Sports teams do not chant that they expect to lose, and "encourage" literally means to instill courage. Premature surrender spoken aloud spreads like any contagious emotion.⁴

---

Phrase Bank

Companion reading for The 20:80 Guide to Hope & Pro-democracy Action. Quotations are verbatim from Solnit's published work. All other text is paraphrase and summary. Substack essay URLs are best-effort links — if a link lands on the newsletter home, search for the essay title there.