We progressives have a problem, not one we haven’t had to face before, but one we need to sort out and confront again: the problem of keeping hope alive even when important battles are lost in elections, legislatures, and courts, and when words from political podiums and some pulpits are hateful lies. We are enduring all of this now and will likely experience it more intensely in the coming months and years.
We are tired of Donald Trump, tired of paying attention to him. Yet he is the current icon of Coming Doom, soon to reoccupy the oval office. Since 2016, every time Trump avoided accountability for some indecency, his smug, closed-lip grin asserted that he was untouchable, and the hate and harm he threatened were impossible to stand against. Post-2024 election, we see an increase of this display; it is in our faces nearly every day.
Of course, our political concerns are about more than Trump, and many of us are trying to sensibly refocus. But the man flouts the norms for choosing cabinet members by selecting clearly unqualified persons, including both accused sexual offenders and convicted felons. He behaves in general as if he were already inaugurated, already empowered to prosecute his political enemies while trying to steal Greenland and the Panama Canal as well as all of Canada. Sovereignty be damned. He blatantly uses his political victory to increase personal profit by announcing new Trump world products for sale.
He is blowing a raspberry, or several of them, at accountability. Trump avoided conviction in two impeachments. He instigated an insurrection, stole hundreds of classified documents, and tried to involve Georgia’s Secretary of State in election fraud. The January 6 insurrectionists and many of Don’s cronies—but not the Donald—went to prison.
We are hang-jawed, dismayed and frustrated. Trump’s actions retain our attention. We can neither escape him nor stop him.
The increasing damage to norms and legal accountability over the years of Trump’s first term prepared the way for formalized immunity. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, half of whom Trump appointed, declared that a president is immune from legal accountability for any crimes committed during a term in office if the acts can be construed as official.
If Trump gets his cabinet choices and also goes ahead with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (not a real department of anything), we should expect serious harm to education, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, the safety of immigrants, the environment, the freedom of speech (including protection from book censorship), global human rights, and protection against the growth of authoritarianism here and in the world.
We progressives have a problem. I’m not referring to the events mentioned above, but to a matter of the spirit. We need to resist becoming too worn out and discouraged to be able to speak out and act boldly.
In the mid-1960s I was a boomer attending a New England college, politically active but not yet with the long experience that would let me notice patterns of behavior across different struggles. I could not yet recognize that some tactics, including rhetorical ones, were just examples of the same old, same old when they showed up.
A representative of the apartheid regime of South Africa came to speak on campus. I sat listening to the speaker with increasing distress and helpless anger, feeling fettered and silenced, as he asserted the unassailable durability of the apartheid system. The structure was very sturdy, he bragged with the quiet politeness of the comfortably entrenched. The resistance movement was quaintly pitiful, its goals unrealistic, its organization without resources. Apartheid wasn’t going anywhere.
Well, it took nearly another quarter century, but the system went down.
The greater lesson for me, though, learned over decades of an activist life, was that oppressors, as a matter of course, will claim invincibility right up to the moment that they fall. Such a claim can be presented in various ways—for instance, with a blatant boast of untouchability. My experience with the South African speaker was simply the first time I was in the room with this behavior.
Strutting bullies do what they do, I think, not so much because they believe their assertions but because such behavior demoralizes the resisters. It is a kind of chest thumping, a tactic of intimidation. The bullying displays of power—verbal, visual, physical, institutional—not only scare, they dishearten. That’s partly what they’re for. So, they undercut the effort to keep hope alive.
Verbal claims of invincibility are often also presumptions of inevitability. Segregation, gender inequality, along with all tribal bigotries are inescapable in the end, this point of view asserts. To struggle against them is unrealistic and immature. It is just weakness pounding on the (already self-thumped) chest of predestined dominance with its tiny fists. This association of asserted invincibility with asserted inevitability is also a denial of change. And that, of course, is a lie. Human arrangements change all the time. Tolerances change; expectations change; balances change.
Again and again in a lifetime of activism we are called on to remanufacture hope. In his 1988 speech, during the regressive presidency of Ronald Reagan, Jesse Jackson advised us to “keep hope alive.” Those were some dark days. And yet, here we are and have been for the several decades since Reagan, keepin’ on keepin’ on.
We must not let the assertion of invincibility, and the whisper of inevitability succeed in demoralizing us. In struggling at least to mitigate the harm of Trump’s coming term, we may succeed or fail—probably a bit of both. If we are depressed into inaction, we have already failed.
There is some challenging work to do in the next few months and years, and I’m finding it hard to sort out simply where and how to get on with it. I find, though, that what helps keep hope alive is participation in a reality-based community of shared purpose. I think this is the best kind of human tribe. The solidarity of common effort builds morale, and good morale makes effort more effective. Daily, we can remanufacture hope.
