‘A new world is being born’: author Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate

When I speak to Rebecca Solnit, she is beaming, and I can’t immediately figure out why. Her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, blasts in with a pragmatic positivity, it’s true. She writes with a “pull yourself together, don’t even think about despair” tone. But that’s not why she’s smiling – it’s because Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor just got arrested. “Why is the UK doing these things the US should be doing? Why now? Wow!”

This “feminist chortling” (as she calls it) about the disgraced royal is right in the bailiwick of the writer who virtually invented the term mansplaining. A truly hilarious story about a man explaining her own book to her at a party became the pandemically viral essay Men Explain Things to Me in 2008, then a fierce, controlled critique of the patriarchy in a book of the same name in 2014.

Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest also, tangentially, makes the point of her new book: yes, we’re living through a political revolution, but it’s not the one you think. It’s not the fast-paced hurtle towards fascist necropolitics we wake up to every day, atrocities constantly exploding, always demanding our attention. Instead, it’s the slow revolution that’s been happening since the 50s, seismic changes in our attitudes to everything, from gender to race to sexuality to science to the climate. Every battle we wage builds on one that was won before. A government can take away your rights, but no one can take away your belief in those rights. The first points of challenge to fascism are memory and history.

“I often feel like a tortoise at a mayfly party,” she says, via video call from San Francisco. “People do not remember the past … [they] often seem to live in a perpetual present. And some find that reassuring, that nothing is ever going to change. Some find it despair-inducing, because nothing is ever going to change. I wanted, in this horrible moment, to remind people that what the far right is doing globally, I think, is largely backlash. A new world is being born, and they’re basically trying to abort it. Which is a little ironic, given their views on abortion.”

Solnit, 64, is referencing the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was living in his own interregnum between the death of the old and the birth of the new, when he said in 1930: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” (“Monsters” is sometimes translated as “morbid symptoms”.) On the brink of fascism and world war, Gramsci wasn’t wrong; I guess what perturbs me is that people have been quoting him full tilt since the financial crash in 2008. By 2013, Michael Gove was name-checking him as his education inspo. Don’t we need a new theorist, along with some new theories, to cope with the fact that situating this as a time of monsters doesn’t seem to defang them or arrest their success?

Antonio Gramsci: ‘Now is the time of monsters.’ Photograph: Alamy

She will agree that these times, in the US certainly, have no precedent. “Even during the civil war, when we were at risk of losing a bunch of states to their disgusting commitment to slavery, the federal government wasn’t corrupted and obscene. We currently have an autoimmune disorder, essentially. The first thing to say is that Donald Trump’s presidency is not really a reflection of what American people want.”

That’s actually not the first thing Solnit says in her book: rather, she starts with a ceremony, in October 2024, in which 466 acres of ranch land north of San Francisco were handed back to the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, to be cared for in perpetuity. This restitution was the fruition of resistance campaigning, activism, poetry and memory that had gone on ever since the land was taken over by white settlers in the 19th century. The spiritual leader and dreamer Essie Parrish, from the Kashaya Pomo tribe, prophesied in the 1950s that “one day the white people would come to us to learn how to take care of the land”. In the 70s and 80s, Solnit was an activist, growing up in the region: “An Irish Catholic Russian Jew; as you can see, I am very pale, but I joke that we haven’t been white that long.” Her family was pretty leftwing, but Solnit’s engagement with indigenous activism was almost more geographically rooted than inherited. “I had a sense, growing up in that town, of something missing. There had been a huge indigenous presence; those people were still around, but they’d been almost completely erased.”

Tipis on the National Mall in Washington DC, 2014, as part of a weeklong demonstration to protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Environmental, conservation, anti-nuclear, civil rights, anti-colonial movements all intersected and coalesced to make a change that would have seemed impossible not just 10 years, even one year, before it happened. “What was also striking about how I grew up,” Solnit says, “is the story of indigenous people was always told as a story that had ended. Bad things had happened, they were very regrettable, but it was all over. We could talk about Native people pretty much entirely in the past tense.” If the cliche is that history is made by the people who show up, Solnit complicates and extends that – change is made by people who refuse to forget.

“Something big I propose in the book,” she says, “is that the whole idea of the ascent of man, his separation from nature, his inevitable progress towards the supremacy of industrialised capitalism, towards this supreme version of himself, is a weird detour from how most people, throughout most of time, have thought about nature and our place in it.” The mistakenness of that detour might show itself in environmental destruction, or it might show itself in an epidemic of loneliness, or in the scourge of corporate rapacity, but, once the imagination has woken up to it, says Solnit, “the change is deep and profound”.

‘We have to keep showing up and keep doing the work’… Solnit in San Francisco. Photograph: San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images

Class consciousness, environmental awareness – some things can’t just be extinguished once they’ve been enlivened. “Fossil fuel lobbyists cannot undo it. Putin and Trump and that idiot in Argentina [Javier Milei] cannot undo it. They’re trying to push rewind on the VCR, which feels like the right technological moment in history for them. They’re essentially saying, if you listen closely: ‘You all are very powerful. You’ve changed the world profoundly, with the environmental and climate work, feminism, queer rights, the general anti-authoritarian push for accountability and equality. All those things are connected.’ Your enemies appraise you accurately, even when you don’t believe it yourself.”

Solnit quotes the American theologian Walter Brueggemann, who said “hope arises from memory”. “You can turn that inside out to say that despair arises from forgetting. If you forget that every good thing we have came about as the result of a heroic struggle, of course you will despair. But the right for women to be treated as people and to have voices and to participate in public and civic life is the result of a heroic struggle. Racial equality, far from perfectly achieved, but to the extent which it has been, is the result of a heroic struggle. When it comes to the environment, often our victories look like nothing: the river that wasn’t dammed or is no longer polluted, the forest that wasn’t cut down, the species that didn’t go extinct. You cannot see them, but they were the result of heroic struggle, and to know that is to know we have tremendous power. These things were contingent on us actually showing up, on doing the work. We have to keep showing up and keep doing the work.

“This book was written hastily and might not be my most graceful,” Solnit says, not sounding at all fussed by that. I don’t think it reads rushed, for what that’s worth, but what she is underlining, in a self-deprecating and gentle, tortoise tone, is that the mayflies, the progressive ones at least, need to start treating their own origin story with more respect. When destructive forces are setting the political agenda – when your government is rounding up your neighbours, when areas across the Middle East are in flames – you can’t not discuss it. But if you don’t simultaneously remember the creativity in politics, the victories, you’ll give in to a sense that things can only get worse.

“Nothing is inevitable,” Solnit says. “I use the word ‘evitable’ often.” It’s a familiar idea, that the far right creates chaos in order to distract and thereby upturn productive change, but Solnit dwells on the mechanics: “Authoritarianism always sees fact and truth as delivered by journalism, by history and by science as rival sources of power. Those are radically democratic things. You can be a king or a commoner, and the rules of gravity are still the same. So they attempt to undermine those things.” The politics of chaotic spectacle, disinformation and outright untruth leaves you endlessly trying to prove gravity, your own priorities derailed. The pattern is similar to that in an abusive relationship: it doesn’t matter what you say, and it doesn’t matter whether or not gravity exists. The purpose is to lock you into the engagement so that it becomes your reality.

‘The world I was born into no longer exists’ … Solnit at home in San Francisco. Photograph: Winni Wintermeyer/The Guardian

“Something I’ve been saying since I wrote Hope in the Dark” (Solnit’s influential 2004 work was a paean to activism and hope) “is that optimism, pessimism – and we can add climate doomerism and cynicism – all assume we know the future, and therefore nothing is required from us. I think the future is radically uncertain, and therefore much is required of us.” It’s not new information, but it is immensely persuasive, especially when Solnit picks at random developments that would have seemed “inconceivable, unfathomable” until they happened – from Epstein’s arrest and disgrace to the collapse of Soviet totalitarian regimes. “I remember chatting with a German photographer in 1989 – we both thought the Berlin Wall would outlive us, that the cold war was permanent,” she says. “Seeing the progress of feminism, being in San Francisco for the first great eruption of marriage equality, when just thousands of couples came to our city hall, in joy and amazement to get married, seeing the Paris climate treaty pass. I was one of the campaigners to stop the Keystone XL pipeline that would have brought the filthy crude from Alberta to refineries in the US for export. We fought it for 12 years, while the naysayers stood on the sidelines and told us we were doing it wrong and we would never win, and then we won. The world I was born into no longer exists.”

I wonder a lot about the pervasive climate pessimism, which spans the political spectrum and runs across generations; how much deeper it feels in the bones than the nuclear-war anxiety and pessimism of the 80s – whether that’s because the climate crisis is objectively worse, or because there’s been a stealth authoritarian interest in bedding that despair in, because it makes everyone more pliant. It’s unanswerable – the climate crisis is objectively worse, there’s more data for it, more has happened that can’t be reversed, more forces drive it forwards. But we didn’t know that in the 80s; the comparative verve and ambition of that time cannot logically have been because we thought “annihilation would be hideous, but at least we’re not on course for 4C”.

So, perhaps the spread of pessimism has been a deliberated project, but if it has been, you can’t weather it on your own. “One of the beautiful, profound things I’ve seen over and over,” Solnit says, “is those moments of uprisings, anti-war protests, No Kings demonstrations, Occupy Wall Street bring a sense of power and belonging that is transformative. The solidarity, the sense of purpose and interconnectedness, is so meaningful.” In her book A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), Solnit describes the intensity of communities forged by natural disasters – the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, a savage explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina. She sees the same unbreakable bonds being forged in activism: the friendships, the energy, the self-awareness and the ambition created by political action stay with you for the rest of your life; they often define your life.

“I often quote my friend Bill McKibben [the environmentalist]. We were sitting on a concrete floor at an activist space during the Paris climate treaty process [the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015]. Somebody walked up and asked him a question he gets asked all the time. ‘What’s the best thing I can do as an individual?’ He said, ‘Stop being an individual.’ You may have your own quirky playlist and eye-makeup techniques, but you also have this solidarity. When you act, you act with others.”