“It is quite clear to anyone who pays attention that (Donald) Trump essentially intends to launch a authoritarian regime, suspend the constitution, lots of human rightsto leave Elon Musk destroy the economyto leave RFK Jr. destroy public healthcontinue the attack against reproductive rightsand completely go back all the progress the Biden administration has made on climate, just as it did with (Barak) Obama, when he withdrew us from the Paris Climate Treaty upon taking office,” says Rebecca Solnit on a call, a few days before the 2024 elections. “It’s a disaster for everything.”

The fact that Trump is running for president again has already thrown a saresque déjà vu over the past few months. But it especially hits me when I start talking with Solnit. I first met the author and activist shortly before the 2016 elections, during a series of interviews for a She magazine profile. His dazzling success Men explain things to me, published in 2012, was a rallying cry in view of these elections; in the process, she produced her 2004 book Hope in the dark available as a free e-book, and it has served as a balm to many. “This is a massive disruption and crisis,” she told me then. “The scary thing is that a lot of what comes out of this is up to us.”

Eight years later, when I call her, she is back in her San Francisco apartment, following door-to-door campaigns with the ecologist 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 published a climate anthology titled Not too late, and supplemented it at the beginning of this year with a practical guide which will be included in subsequent editions and available for free online. Most recently, she wrote the forewords to two collections of posthumous essays that address climate, technology, democracy, and war: the recently reissued book by activist and urban theorist Mike Davis. Dead cities (Haymarket), and the anthropologist David Graeber The ultimate hidden truth of the world (FSG), released later this month. (Having also written the foreword to a collection of Jim Harrison poetry, she calls this her “dead white man season.”) She writes, in The ultimate hidden truth, of Graeber’s “fierce joy.” To me, she describes him as someone who was, refreshingly, “extremely celebratory and extremely hopeful,” who sought and found change and resistance in the world around him. “There’s a real tendency on the left to be dark, grumpy, always dissatisfied, as a style,” she says. “I think the world is imperfect. We must do more. But I think the glass is half empty, not a great recruiting tool, and not much fun to be around or be around.

Solnit 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 doing?

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

Where is the place of this terror for you?

Unlike previous regimes, such as George W. Bush, that I thought was just destructiveTrump intends to remove the checks and balances: free speech, independent media, everything that allows 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 it’s comparable to the Confederacy in some ways, except the Confederacy was never going to take over the entire country. They just seceded.

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

I wrote about it in a social media post in October 2016. May Boeve, then executive director of 350.org, recognized its usefulness, took it down, made it into a meme, and it’s been making the rounds ever since, much to my delight.