Beware the apostles of dystopia. They come to destroy your hope. There are two sects. One preaches survival-of-the-fittest disdain for any social responsibility. The other preaches defeatism and accommodation in the face of wealth and power. They are all hope, destroyers.
The necessity of hope struck me hard on Saturday, January 25. In the morning, I read two provocative op-eds in the NY Times.
Trump-distaining conservative columnist, Bret Stevens, cautions, “Anyone but Trump? Not So Fast. Let’s not exchange one reckless president for another.” Essentially he argues that Trump, while personally reprehensible, hasn’t changed life for most Americans. He goes on to plant fear of radical progressives: Too much hope for a more equitable future is dangerously destabilizing.
Historian David Motadel warns us about, “The Myth of Middle-Class Liberalism. The bourgeois are supposed to ensure open, democratic societies. In fact, they rarely have.” Historically, he argues, “the middle classes have frequently sided with illiberal forms of government when they feared for their privileges and social stability.”
In the evening, my wife and I watched the movie Just Mercy. It dramatizes the relentless efforts of Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, to exonerate death row victims of racial injustice and fear. Freed from jail after many years wrongful imprisonment, Walter McMillan tells Stevenson, “We've all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don't expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”
Between now and the 2020 presidential primary and general election, apologists for and defenders of our inequitable, livable climate-destroying status quo will try to scare hope out of middle-class voters into selecting anyone but the dangerous progressives in the race, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Every fear-based, divisive scare tactic will be employed. In fact, they are our best hope. Some will allude to, but not explicitly advocate, exclusionary authoritarianism as the only viable path for America. Others will plead with voters to take the safe “moderate” path.
Progressives need to heed Motadel’s and McMillan’s warning. Anyone who gets the dire threat of Trumpism needs to heed the warning. Anyone with a mind to sit out the election or vote for third party candidate needs to heed the warning. Things always can and often do get worse long before they get better. When it does, innocent people suffer and die. However, the solution is not to bend to the illusion of a safe moderate. It is to vote for hope.
The vulnerability people who identify as middle-class voters is that they feel that what they worked for is precarious. It is, but not due to imagined enemies among Them. Too many of us have accepted the dystopian lie that not everyone can get ahead because scarcity and inequality are unalterable facts of life. The necessary companion of giving in to the erosion democracy is giving up hope.
Modern Republicans have always opposed efforts to mediate inequality and defend the privileges of wealth. Democrats of the last several decades have failed to provide satisfying answers to the disruption of globalization, digital-age automation, challenges to US global dominance, and mass migration. As a result, people feel insecure. Unless Democratic candidates embrace hope for fundamental changes in prevailing social and economic structures, they will continue to lose the confidence and loyalty of voters.
As has been the Democratic fashion, avoiding talk about the poor or eschewing the words, working-class, will not do. Neither will just talking about helping, “those less fortunate.” These pandering avoidance strategies divide rather than unite people who should be allies. The defeatist talk about what costs too much or what legislation can’t pass in Congress when referencing what should be ensured fundamental rights like health care or fighting climate change is similarly hope-crushing. Say it out loud, Democrats. The interests of most of us are not just compatible. As Martin Luther King put eloquently, we “are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Make no mistake, crushing hope is the pathway for divisiveness, acceptance of racist authoritarians, and voting away democracy. Vote for hope.
Arthur H. Camins is a lifelong educator. He writes about education and social justice. He works part-time with curriculum developers at UC Berkeley as an assessment specialist. He retired recently as Director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology. He has taught and been an administrator in New York City, Massachusetts, and Louisville, Kentucky. The ideas expressed in this article are his alone.