December 9, 2025
A Note in Solidarity
My daughter asked me a question during dinner last night that stopped me in my tracks. We were talking about her plans for after graduation, and she looked at me, her expression a mixture of hope and a weariness that no teenager should have to carry. “Dad,” she said, “is it supposed to be this hard?”
My wife and I have built a good, middle-class life for our two teenagers. We’ve played by the rules. But lately, I feel a low-grade hum of anxiety that I can’t shake. It’s there when I’m looking at the grocery bill, which seems to defy gravity. It’s there when I read the headlines on my phone, which feel like they’re coming from a different planet. And it was there in my daughter’s question. She’s looking at the world we’ve built and she’s asking if the struggle is the point.
I didn’t have a good answer for her. Because when I look at the news from just the last 24 hours, I see a story being written that confirms her fears. It’s a story about power being pulled into fewer and fewer hands, while the rest of us are left to deal with the consequences.
We hear about a “resilient” economy, but in the same breath, we learn the government is funding a $12 billion bailout for farmers hurt by tariffs that were imposed by executive whim. We see the nation’s highest court poised to grant even more power to the presidency, while the people’s branch, Congress, seems to have lost its voice, with even the Speaker joking that he’s not really in charge. We see a report from international observers declaring that the space for civic life in America is now “obstructed,” citing the suppression of protests and threats against a free press.
And in the most jarring contradiction, we learn that on the very same day the administration approved the sale of advanced AI chips to China, a move experts warn will give away our primary competitive advantage, the Justice Department was simultaneously cracking down on a network smuggling those exact same chips.
Failure. It’s a process that is ignoring the voices, needs, and unique, lived experiences of millions of Americans. It’s a process that prioritizes the short-term profits of a single company over our collective security and tax cuts for the wealthiest over the ability of 40 million of our neighbors to feed their families.
A Better Way of Seeing
The tfp Collective offers a framework called Solidarity in Practice that helps us move beyond the partisan shouting match and analyze the deeper patterns at play. It suggests that the answer isn’t about choosing between individual freedom and collective good, but building responsive practices where both can flourish together.
This framework starts with the idea of Singularity. This is the simple, radical belief that every single person’s perspective is unique, irreducible, and essential. Your experience, my experience, my daughter’s experience, they aren’t just data points. They are the most important information we have about whether our society is actually working. The current process fails because it erases this Singularity. It treats a family struggling with food insecurity not as unique individuals with a story, but as a line item in a budget to be cut.
From this, we get to Solidarity. Not agreeing on everything but a practical commitment to creating conditions where everyone, especially the most vulnerable, can thrive. It’s the understanding that my flourishing is tied to yours. When we allow tax policy to be written by the few for the few, creating a crisis that threatens to gut food and medical assistance for millions, we are breaking that commitment. We’re choosing individual gain over our shared responsibility.
The Fix
To fix this, we need to get creative. We need to build new ways for people to have a real voice in the decisions that affect their lives. A powerful way to think about this is instead of asking “How do we administer SNAP?”, we should ask, “What is that single mother really trying to get done when she uses food assistance?” The job is to provide a reliable, nutritious meal for her family with dignity. How can we build a responsive practice that helps her do that job better?
This could mean participatory budgeting at the state level, where residents have a direct say in how tax dollars are spent. It could mean creating community-led media platforms to tell the stories that are being ignored. It could mean using technology to connect farmers, small business owners, and families directly with policymakers, creating a constant feedback loop that makes it impossible to ignore their Singularity.
Responsive Practices. It’s what happens when we stop seeing our society as a fixed machine to be controlled from the top down and start seeing it as a living, responsive process that we are all co-creating in every moment.
Concrete Proof
Concrete proof looks like this: Instead of a handful of legislators in a state capital deciding on a tax policy that creates a $1 billion shortfall, a citizen’s assembly is convened. It includes SNAP recipients, small business owners, and billionaires. They are given the same budget data as the legislators and tasked with developing a tax plan that ensures the state’s fiscal health and the well-being of all its citizens. They use deliberation and negotiation, grounded in their diverse, lived experiences, to arrive at a solution.
Concrete proof looks like this: When a university administration tries to silence a student group or a coalition of other groups from across the political spectrum, they rally to defend their right to speak. They practice Solidarity, not because they agree with the students’ message, but because they are committed to the principle that a healthy public square requires the free exchange of ideas.
This is the work of Relational Evolution. It’s the messy, unpredictable, and essential process of learning to be in a community together. It’s about building relationships of trust and mutual respect, even and especially with those with whom we disagree. It’s the only way to answer my daughter’s question with a hopeful “no.” It doesn’t have to be this hard. We just have to choose to do the work of building something better, together.