Author Rebecca Solnit, who popularised the term 'mansplaining', has argued that a 'new world is being born' through a slow revolution that the far right is desperately trying to abort. In an interview, she described her new book, 'The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change', as a call for pragmatic positivity in the face of authoritarian backlash.
Solnit pointed to the recent arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor as an example of progress, noting that such actions by UK authorities are steps the US should be taking. She contrasted the daily focus on far-right victories with the slower, seismic shifts in attitudes towards gender, race, sexuality, science and climate that have been building since the 1950s.
'People do not remember the past,' Solnit said. '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.' She referenced Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci's observation that 'the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.'
Solnit began her book not with politics but with a ceremony in October 2024 where 466 acres of ranch land in California were returned to the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. This restitution, she said, was the fruit of decades of activism, poetry and memory, fulfilling a prophecy from the 1950s by Kashaya Pomo spiritual leader Essie Parrish that 'one day the white people would come to us to learn how to take care of the land.'
