Rebecca Solnit on MAGA wives, protest votes and the fate of the American experiment

“It’s pretty clear to anyone paying attention (Donald) Trump essentially intending to launch a authoritarian regime, suspend the constitution, many human rightsleave Elon Musk destroy the economyleave RFK Jr. destroy public healthfurther attack on reproduction rightsand complete go back all the progress the Biden administration has made on climate as it has with him (Barack) obama, when he took us out of the Paris Climate Treaty as soon as he took office,” he says Rebecca Solnit on a call, just days away from the 2024 election. “It’s a catastrophe for everything.”

The fact that Trump is running for president again has already given a satrec déjà vu in the last few months. But it hits particularly hard when I start talking to Solnit. I first met the author and activist shortly before the 2016 election during a series of interviews for a elle magazine profile. Her runaway shot Men explain things to me, published in 2012, it was a rallying cry in the period leading up to those elections; following this, she made her 2004 book Hope in the dark available as a free e-book and has served as a balm to many. “This is a massive disruption and a crisis,” she told me at the time. “The scary thing is that a lot of what comes out of it is up to us.”

Eight years later, when I call her, she is back in her San Francisco apartment after door-knocking campaigns with environmentalist Bill McKibben in Arizona and Nevada. “What they called the Silver Wave Tour,” she says, “for Third Act, our over-60s climate and democracy group.” In 2023, she released a climate anthology called Not too late, and earlier this year they supplemented it with a practical guide which is included in subsequent printings and available for free online. More recently, she wrote the forewords for two collections of posthumous essays confronting climate, technology, democracy, and war: the new relaunch of activist and urban theorist Mike Davis. Dead cities (Haymarket) and anthropologist David Graeber The last hidden truth of the world (FSG), released later this month. (Also, after writing the foreword to a collection of Jim Harrison’s poems, she calls it “her season of dead white men.”) She writes, in The last hidden truth of Graeber’s “ferocious joy”. To me, she describes him as someone who was, refreshingly, “extremely celebratory and extremely hopeful,” who sought and found change and resilience in the world around him. “There’s a real tendency on the left to be gloomy, grumpy, eternally dissatisfied, in style,” she says. “I think the world is imperfect. We need to do more. But I think personal style is the glass half empty, it’s not a brilliant recruiting tool, and it’s not that fun to be or be around.”

Solnit has always looked for hope in dark times. Here, she talks about the losses and gains since we first met, and what she thinks is still at stake.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: how are you

Rebecca Solnit: I’m horrified by one possibility, one outcome, of this election, but overall I’m not bad.

Where is the place of that terror for you?

Unlike previous regimes such as George W. Bush, which I thought I was just destructiveTrump intends to remove checks and balances: free speech, 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 indeed it’s comparable to the Confederacy in some ways, except the Confederacy was never going to take control of the entire country. They just broke up.

There’s a quote of yours that always comes up around elections, but I’ve seen it more this year: “A vote isn’t a Valentine, it’s a chess move.”

I wrote it in a social media post in October 2016. May Boeve, then the executive director of 350.org, recognized its usefulness, took it out, turned it into a meme, and has been doing the rounds ever since, much to my delight.