Stop despairing. Start building
My conversation with Rebecca Solnit
Friends,
I’m thrilled to be able to share this conversation I had last night with the brilliant Rebecca Solnit. She has a new book out, “The Beginning Comes After the End,” and I couldn’t recommend it to you more highly.
The book is a loving intervention with Solnit’s progressive allies. She reframes the moment we’re in as one not of rightist ascendancy so much as backlash. The backlash, she argues, is because of a huge amount of progress that has been made by progressives. That progress is often forgotten by progressives themselves because of deep-seated mental habits and the laudable desire to fight the next battle.
But we shouldn’t concede to Donald Trump power he doesn’t now have. We shouldn’t build up a weak man into a strongman through our fear. And, Solnit argues, there are abundant answers to how to rebuild from darkness in nature. Those were some of the most powerful parts of the book for me.
Check out our conversation above at YouTube. And I’m attaching some older chats we’ve had for The Ink below that.
