“It’s pretty clear to anyone who’s paying attention that [Donald] Trump essentially intends to launch an authoritarian regime, suspend the constitution, a lot of human rights, let Elon Musk destroy the economy, let RFK Jr. destroy public health, further the attack on reproductive rights, and completely walk back all the progress the Biden administration has made on climate, just like he did with [Barack] Obama, when he pulled us out of the Paris Climate Treaty as soon as he took office,” says Rebecca Solnit on a call, just days out from the 2024 election. “It’s a catastrophe for everything.”
That Trump is running for president again has already cast a Satresque déjà vu over the last several months. But it hits particularly hard when I start speaking with Solnit. I first met the author and activist shortly before the 2016 election, during a series of interviews for an Elle magazine profile. Her runaway hit Men Explain Things to Me, published in 2012, was a rallying cry in the leadup to that election; in its aftermath, she made her 2004 book Hope in The Dark available as a free e-book, and it served as a balm to many. “This is a massive disruption and crisis,” she told me then. “The scary thing is, a lot of what comes of it is up to us.”
Eight years later, when I ring her up, she’s back in her San Francisco apartment following door-knocking campaigns with the environmentalist Bill McKibben in Arizona and Nevada. “What they dubbed the Silver Wave Tour,” she says, “for Third Act, our climate and democracy group for people over 60.” In 2023, she released a climate anthology called Not Too Late, and early this year supplemented it with a practical guide that’s included in later print runs and available for free online. More recently, she’s written the forewords for two posthumous essay collections that grapple with climate, technology, democracy, and war: activist and urban theorist Mike Davis’s newly rereleased Dead Cities (Haymarket), and the anthropologist David Graeber’s The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World (FSG), out later this month. (Having also written the foreword to a poetry collection by Jim Harrison, she calls this her “season of dead white men.”) She writes, in The Ultimate Hidden Truth, of Graeber’s “ferocious joy.” To me she describes him as someone who was, refreshingly, “extremely celebratory and extremely hopeful,” who looked for and found change and resistance in the world around him. “There’s a real tendency on the left to be gloomy, grumpy, forever dissatisfied, as a style,” she says. “I think the world is imperfect. We need to do more. But I think that personal style of the glass is half empty, is not a brilliant recruitment tool and not that fun to either be, or be around.”
Solnit has always looked for hope in bleak times. Here, she talks about losses and gains since the first time we met, and what she believes is still at stake.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Vanity Fair: How are you doing?
Rebecca Solnit: I am terrified by one possibility, one outcome, of this election, but overall I’m not bad.
Where is the locus of that terror for you?
Unlike earlier regimes, like George W. Bush, that I thought were merely destructive, Trump intends to take away the checks and balances: the freedom of speech, the independent media, all the things that allow us to continue to be a democracy even if we don’t like the president. It’s a threat we’ve never faced before in this country, and really is comparable to the Confederacy in some ways, except the Confederacy was never going to take control of the whole country. They just seceded.
There’s a quote of yours that always turns up around elections, but I have seen it more this year: “A vote is not a valentine, it’s a chess move.”
I wrote it in a social media post in October of 2016. May Boeve, then executive director of 350.org, recognized its utility, pulled it out, made it into a meme, and it’s been making the rounds ever since, to my delight.
