Rebecca Solnit Champions the 'Slow Revolution' Against Authoritarian Backlash
When speaking with author Rebecca Solnit, her beaming smile immediately captures attention. The reason becomes clear as she references recent political developments, including the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, which she describes with "feminist chortling." This reaction perfectly aligns with the writer who popularized the term "mansplaining" through her viral 2008 essay and subsequent book Men Explain Things to Me.
The Real Political Revolution Happening Now
Solnit's new book, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, presents a pragmatic yet positive perspective on current political transformations. She argues that while daily headlines focus on authoritarian victories and atrocities, a more significant "slow revolution" has been unfolding since the 1950s. This gradual shift encompasses seismic changes in attitudes toward gender, race, sexuality, science, and climate.
"I often feel like a tortoise at a mayfly party," Solnit explains via video call from San Francisco. "People do not remember the past ... [they] often seem to live in a perpetual present. I wanted, in this horrible moment, to remind people that what the far right is doing globally is largely backlash. A new world is being born, and they're basically trying to abort it."
Historical Memory as Resistance
The 64-year-old author references Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who described living through "the time of monsters" during the interregnum between the death of the old world and the birth of the new. While Gramsci's observation from 1930 has been frequently quoted since the 2008 financial crisis, Solnit acknowledges that current times in the United States 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," she notes. "We currently have an autoimmune disorder, essentially."
Land Restoration and Indigenous Activism
Solnit begins her book with a powerful example of change: the October 2024 ceremony returning 466 acres of ranch land north of San Francisco to the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. This restitution resulted from decades of resistance campaigning, activism, poetry, and memory preservation since white settlers took the land in the 19th century.
Growing up in the region as an activist in the 1970s and 1980s, Solnit experienced the intersection of environmental, conservation, anti-nuclear, civil rights, and anti-colonial movements. "What was also striking about how I grew up," she 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."
The Power of Remembering Victories
Solnit emphasizes that change occurs through people who refuse to forget. She challenges the traditional narrative of "the ascent of man" and inevitable progress toward industrialized capitalism, suggesting this represents a "weird detour" from how most people throughout history have understood humanity's relationship with nature.
"Fossil fuel lobbyists cannot undo it. Putin and Trump and that idiot in Argentina [Javier Milei] cannot undo it," Solnit asserts. "They're trying to push rewind on the VCR, which feels like the right technological moment in history for them. Your enemies appraise you accurately, even when you don't believe it yourself."
Hope Arises from Memory
Quoting American theologian Walter Brueggemann's statement that "hope arises from memory," Solnit adds: "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."
She points to women's rights, racial equality, and environmental protections as achievements resulting from heroic struggles. "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."
Authoritarianism's Attack on Truth
Solnit analyzes how authoritarian forces create chaos to distract from productive change. "Authoritarianism always sees fact and truth as delivered by journalism, by history and by science as rival sources of power," she explains. "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."
This pattern mirrors abusive relationships, where the goal becomes locking opponents into endless engagement rather than addressing substantive issues. "It doesn't matter what you say, and it doesn't matter whether or not gravity exists," Solnit observes.
Climate Pessimism and Collective Action
Addressing pervasive climate pessimism, Solnit questions whether this despair has been deliberately cultivated to make people more pliant. While acknowledging the climate crisis is objectively worse than previous threats like nuclear war anxiety in the 1980s, she emphasizes the importance of collective action.
"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."
She recalls environmentalist Bill McKibben's response when asked about the best individual action: "Stop being an individual." Solnit elaborates: "You may have your own quirky playlist and eye-makeup techniques, but you also have this solidarity. When you act, you act with others."
The World That No Longer Exists
Reflecting on her lifetime of activism, Solnit notes the profound changes she has witnessed. "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 recalls. "Seeing the progress of feminism, being in San Francisco for the first great eruption of marriage equality ... seeing the Paris climate treaty pass."
Her conclusion remains steadfast: "Nothing is inevitable. I use the word 'evitable' often. The world I was born into no longer exists, but that demonstrates exactly how much change is possible when people show up and do the work together."
