Political Change Requires A Hopeful Vision Of Tomorrow: Rebecca Solnit

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San Francisco writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit came into my consciousness two decades ago as I was doing research for my dissertation. Her 2004 non-fiction book, Hope in the Dark, spoke to me with her rejection of cynicism and despair. She depicted the evolution of rights, ideas, concepts, and words “to describe and to realize what was once invisible or unimaginable,” which she encapsulated as “both a breathing space and a toolbox.”

The Beginning Comes after the End is Solnit’s new 2026 title and a thematic sequel to Hope in the Dark.

The conservative Right has listened to the progressive movement, Solnit describes in a recent interview with David Marchese of the New York Times, as well as the way we’ve “changed the world profoundly.” The bad news, she continues, “is that they hate it and want to change it all back. There is a backlash, and it is significant. But it is not comprehensive or global.”

And it’s that sense of hope as defiance that sets Solnit apart from many activists. Instead of succumbing to endless responses to conservative Right narratives, Solnit focuses on stories of incremental change.

“One of the stories people don’t comprehend is the energy revolution at the turn of the millennium. We didn’t have an alternative to fossil fuels. But because solar and wind have suddenly become these incredibly cheap, incredibly effective adaptable technologies, we can run almost everything on renewables and have more energy than we could possibly use. Very few people comprehend it because it’s nerdy, technical, and incremental.”

Noting that the great majority of people on Earth support climate action, Solnit explains that the obstacles are not technological — they’re politically driven by “the fossil-fuel industry and the rich and powerful and governmental figures who either are or serve the fossil-fuel industry are what’s holding us back.” She goes on to articulate one of our era’s “great weaknesses” — a superhero fascination. Actually, she offers, “the world mostly gets changed through collective effort.”

We can focus on what’s vanished by not transitioning more quickly to clean energy, or we can save everything on the planet that is worth saving. “We’ve already lost a lot, but we don’t have to lose everything,” she instructs. “We don’t have to surrender.” A balance can exist in which activists “can be kind of heartbroken and exhilarated about climate and keep doing the work.” The work, she insists, keeps getting done, even with pushback from various forces “including from the current horrendous administration here in the US.”

Instead of agreeing to the interviewer’s description of progressive activist strategies against President Trump and Trumpism as “counterproductive,” Solnit argues that the MAGA world is racist, authoritarian, misogynist, and homophobic. “Tiptoeing around it,” she recharacterizes, “protects them and not the targets of the hatred and discrimination.” The Administration’s “horrific brutality” is reason enough to defer politeness and “to call things by their true names.” The answer to Trump “always has been and always will be civil society.”

Citing scholar of non-violence George Lakey, Solnit asserts that polarization in society is good because “that’s when you have clarity. Sometimes people have to pick sides. You do not get authoritarians to behave better by being meek and gentle and polite. You get it by being strong.”

Solnit as Storyteller: Reimagining our World by Clutching onto Hope

As a storyteller, Solnit recognizes how “stories can obscure the truth as well as reveal the truth. There are stories to justify white supremacy, misogyny, environmental destruction.” She refutes the approach of “this regime,” which she says “has to lie constantly” and tell destructive and oversimplified stories. She also admonishes progressives to remember that our stories are not “magical devices that will do all our work for us.” That position is, itself, a bad story, she says.

A column that Solnit wrote this week after the New York Times interview imagines how different the US and the world would likely have been if Al Gore had been elected president. Gore would have unalterably changed so much, Solnit, always the storyteller, remarks.

• The state of the earth in regard to climate action would not look the same.
• Likely there would’ve been no 9/11.
• No Afghanistan and Iraq quagmire-wars.
• No appointment of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court — so no Citizens United decision.
• No Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett and no overturning of Roe vs. Wade and a bunch of environmental legislation.
• Maybe there’d be a chief justice with enough principle to oust the utterly corrupt Clarence Thomas.

“Of course, Gore would have done many things I would not have liked or supported,” she allows, “but as an activist said to me in 2012, you’re choosing who you’re going to fight with, not who you absolutely agree with. All that prompted me in 2016 to coin my most widely circulated freestanding sentence ever: ‘Voting is a chess move, not a valentine.’”

Hope in the Dark and toward a Collective Light

If you’ve never read Hope in the Dark, I highly recommend grabbing a copy from your local library. In the book, Solnit asks us to look to the past and “the momentousness of what has happened: in order to understand the future before us.” She upends a popular slogan — she suggest we ‘think locally, act globally” to describe what’s under assault by transnational corporations. She repeats her mantra: “The resistance is often globally networked.”

In the text she attempts to “illuminate a past that is too seldom recognized, one in which the power of individuals and unarmed people is colossal, in which the scale of change in the world and the collective imagination over the past few decades is staggering, in which the astonishing things that have taken place can brace us to enter that dark future with boldness.”

That collective imagination can address elements of history that permeate today’s society: “questions of sovereignty, visibility, representation, reparation, and land rights, among other things.” Remembering the past can become the ground to make change in the present. “Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibilities are sisters.”

She muses that we’d live in a different world if “if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good.”

She asks progressives not to limit themselves to “the underside of the dominant culture’s story,” which is often the content of daily headlines “that overlooks groundswells, sea changes, and alternatives.” It’s not enough to be political aware in-and-of-itself, she says, because perspectives without activism offer little else than “looking at the devastation, your face turned toward the center of things. Activism can generate hope because in itself it constitutes an alternative and turns away from the corruption at the center to face the wild possibilities and the heroes at the edges or at your side.”

As example, Solnit reminds us of the work of science writer Rachel Carson as she was finishing Silent Spring, her landmark denunciation of pesticides. Carson, like the Civil Rights Movement, “achieved not only specific gains but a change in the imagination of race and justice.” Carson’s book was instrumental in getting DDT banned — “which reversed the die-off of many bird species — ” and it also launched a worldview of nature in which interactive, interconnected systems. Later to be called “ecological,” Carson’s ideas “have entered the mainstream to transform our imagination of the earth and its processes, of fire, water, air, soil, species, interdependence, biodiversities, watersheds, food chains (these latter words also entered the common vocabulary in recent times).”

Solnit invigorates us with the proposition that we have “the power to change the world to some degree, that the current state of affairs is not inevitable, that all trajectories are not downhill.”

Resources

• Hope in the dark: Untold histories, wild possibilities. Rebecca Solnit. Haymarket Books. 2016 (updated edition).
• “Rebecca Solnit says the left’s next hero is already here.” David Marchese. New York Times. March 7, 2026.
• “Terminology, clarity, and the question of what is the left?” Rebecca Solnit. Meditations in an emergency. March 9, 2026.
• The beginning comes after the end: Notes on a world of change. Rebecca Solnit. Granta Publications. 2026.