Radical Hope Is Essential

3 Strategies for Moving Forward

Hope has long had a bad rap as if it is the sandpit of the naïve. Many people feel that is truer than ever today. 

After all, to hope that 2025 and beyond will not usher in more suffering, division, inequality, cruelty, and setbacks on critical issues like climate change—well, that would be naïve indeed.

The incoming 47^th president has made his intentions clear. And he will have more power at his disposal than any human being ever should, most of all one driven not by public interest but self-interest.

But that does not mean it is naïve to cultivate hope. It means it is more important than ever. Joseph O’Neill observed in The New York Review of Books this weekend that “a hopeless population is more vulnerable to autocracy.” 

So, how do we develop the “radical hope” philosopher Jonathan Lear described nearly twenty years ago that we desperately need now? 

We will need to learn much about this in the months ahead, but here are a few thoughts for the moment: 

1.    Respect the fear and despair—the hopelessness—many people feel. These are genuine and understandable emotions, and squashing feelings or asking others to never leads to anything constructive. But let’s also provide a container for them because we have work to do.

If you run a dispirited team, give people an opportunity to have a facilitated conversation, or two or three, to talk through what they are experiencing. 

If you are running solo, connect with like-minded friends as you likely already have, and permit yourselves to talk it through until you feel an energy arising or a conviction, in the words of Michelle Obama, to “do something,” even if at the smallest of scales.  

2.    Recognize we are entering a new chapter that demands a new kind of maturity. Like countless people worldwide, Americans have been pummeled by challenging events in recent years. But unlike people in many other nations, we seem to have a mythology that says it shouldn’t be this way. 

Many of us want to believe, as the t-shirts say, “Life is Good.” We want to believe every generation should earn more and enjoy more than the prior one. We dare believe happiness is our birthright. 

And what about those who have lived on the margins, long denied access to the American dream? Many have clung to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Perhaps we have underestimated just how long or how circuitous that arc is.

As others have noted, America is a relatively adolescent culture, both chronologically and as a consequence of having been spared throughout most of our history from the sobering events so many other nations have experienced—such as deadly wars on our own soil.

Today’s younger generations have come of age having to reckon with climate change—and as my son told me recently, knowing no president who truly inspired him. Meanwhile, those of us who have been around longer may still cling to illusions about the specialness of America, which makes this new chapter all the more heartbreaking. 

So perhaps we, above all, need to develop a more mature perspective. One that reflects, as political philosopher Hannah Ardent made most clear, that people are capable of great darkness–some with eyes open, some with eyes closed, some bit by banal bit.  

Life is good, in other words. And life is hard. Now, it is up to us to learn how to live through a more dramatic airing of this reality, closing our eyes to neither aspect and doing our best to make things better. 

3.    Learn from history. Plenty of people have walked this path before. On Election Night, I Googled “anti-authoritarian movements” to remind myself of the people who have resisted strongman regimes before us.

Among the many that came up were the French Resistance, the White Rose movement, and the Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance during World War II. The Algerian National Liberation Front in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the anti-Pinochet Movement in Chile during the 1970s, the Polish Solidarity Movement of the 1980s, and the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement that culminated that same decade.

Of course, closer to home, there was also the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which (in a time of a healthy democracy, at least for some) courageously stood against authoritarianism, racism, and the violation of civil rights. 

So What?

“So what?” you may think about this. “I am shocked, angry, and sad that we are suddenly facing what appears to be a clear turn toward authoritarianism here in the United States, long considered the world’s beacon of democracy.”

“And,” you may think, “I’m especially disheartened that it is happening when we urgently need to progress on vital challenges that are in the best interest of us all—again, such as climate change.” 

To this, I say Me,Too. 

Yet here we are. And so, now we must honor each other in our responses to this new reality, learn and grow from it as we can, and stand on the shoulders of those who have kept the light of hope alive in dark times before us. 

What that looks like remains to be seen, but it will almost certainly require resilience, resistance, and wise role modeling. 

One helpful framework that grounds me is ordinary heroism in extraordinary times. This is about rejecting the roles of victim or bystander and embracing what is within reach of us all: the cultivation of courage, altruism, and integrity. 

Until recently, I considered courage and altruism the most essential of these three elements: developing the courage to face our fears and the altruism to take action for the well-being of others. 

But now, I recognize that integrity is equally important. I do not mean only the integrity to align ourselves with truth and goodness but the integrity to strive to be and do our best with whatever life serves up. 

As one of my heroes, the late Toni Morrison, said: “The grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about the solution. It is about being as fearless as one can be and behaving as beautifully as one can under completely impossible circumstances.”

I will share more resources in the weeks and months ahead. But please feel free to message me if you’d like to chat about my offerings to support good people doing hard things in these tough times.