Keep Hope Alive

With Donald Trump coming back around, we're going to need it

Waco is as good as any place for hope to die, and yesterday was a better time than most. A choir comprised of men imprisoned for the Jan. 6 insurrection sang “Justice for All.” Behind them played images of the pro-Trump rioters on a massive screen. Then Ted Nugent called Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “homosexual weirdo,” followed by former President Donald Trump identifying the biggest threats to the country as “high-level politicians that work in the U.S. government like McConnel, Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden.”

To which I would respond, high-level politicians who work in the U.S. government, Mr. President. Who, not that.

“Don’t misunderstand me, I have no hope,” says Marc Maron, pacing the stage in his more-pessimistic-than-usual HBO comedy special, From Bleak to Dark. “I think if you have hope, what are you, fucking seven?” He taped the show before a surge among Republicans without college degrees boosted Trump into a clear lead against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Maron could not have predicted that Trump’s apparently imminent indictment for the illegal Stormy Daniels payoff became the latest ditch all Republicans have thrown themselves into, but I’m sure he’s not surprised.

Hope is not having a heyday.

My friend Brad Wetzler once lost hope on purpose. This was years ago, but it applies now because his memoir was just published this week. Into the Soul of the World tells how a once-rising star in magazine writing fell back down to earth where he began a lifelong journey to healing. He had a lot to deal with: a lousy dad, PTSD from childhood trauma, and his family gaslit him about it. Doctors thought the solution was a lot of drugs. He spent nearly a decade as a (perfectly legally) drugged-out zombie. Also — and perhaps I’m the only one who thought this was hilarious — he’s the one at Outside magazine who said to Jon Krakauer, “Hey, you know what would make a great story? You should GO TO Everest!” Dude had a lot going on, is what I’m saying.

He took a trip to Israel to find Jesus, or at least the sense of love and acceptance in the song, “Jesus Loves Me, This I know.” But his trip to the Holy Land proved less than bountiful, and as he looked back on his unsuccessful search for inner peace, he realized he’d been going about it all wrong.

“I’d hoped for so much, but writing this now, I understand that hope is not a useful strategy for self-transformation,” he realized. “As we try to morph and change, we must embrace a certain amount of optimism that we can get to the other side, that our lives can get better, that the shit will shift. Without optimism, it can be difficult to do the hard work of going to yoga classes, meditating regularly, showing up and being present at therapy sessions. But hope — wishing things would get better, or praying that our lives or the world was different — is useless.”

Looking back, Brad realized he was “still leaning too heavily on hope.”

Brad has gotten to the other side and appears to be a happy and well-adjusted man, at least for a writer. And his tale is remarkable. He was broken for so long, and he put himself back together. He did the work, so I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to hope’s uselessness.

But that’s not how we do. As long as we’ve been coming together to chew over ideas in this newsletter, we’ve been talking about Hopepunk, a storytelling trend I read about in 2019 that became my governing ethos of the Trump era. Hopepunk, an ethos that posits that hope creates the space for a successful outcome over seemingly insurmountable odds, was coined as a philosophy in a Tumblr post in 2017: “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on.” By 2019 the word showed up in the Collins English Dictionary: “a literary and artistic movement that celebrates the pursuit of positive aims in the face of adversity.” I first wrote about Hopepunk in 2019 and then again in 2020, 2021, and twice in 2022. Hopepunk is my antidote to dystopia, and dystopia was, and still is, having a heyday.

Was I wrong? Was I wrong not just to hope for something better, but to believe that hope is necessary to create that which is better?

Barack Obama ran on hope and change in 2008, prompting Rudy Giuliani to sneeringly retort at the Republican National Convention, “Change is not a destination, just as ‘hope’ is not a strategy.” The hope I felt in 2008 now hurts like the memory of having hurt someone or embarrassed myself. And as I mentioned last week, the artists who created Obama’s “Hope” poster is now focusing on the themes of climate change, disinformation, police brutality, and racism. Even the “Hope” guy has lost hope.

But that phrase “hope is not a strategy” has proven more enduring than most of Obama’s accomplishments. A former Army Chief of Staff used it in a leadership tutorial, and Chuck Hagel, John Boehner, Mitt Romney, and the Cato Institute have all used it in various ways. Apparently “hope is not a strategy” is used quite commonly in the military.

And as Mae the bartender teaches the optimistic American soccer coach in season 1 of Ted Lasso, “It's the hope that kills you.”

OK, fine. You want to talk about hope, let’s talk about hope. If wishes were horses, we’d all have a merry Christmas. Of course hope isn’t a strategy anymore than crossing your fingers improves your odds. And I can attest to the fact that hoping that the Orioles win has occasionally preceded their winning, but even I can’t pretend that I had any effect on the outcome. Yes, the hope will kill you if you invest your emotional well-being in an outcome. Better to go in expecting nothing and not be disappointed, goes this bit of grim reasoning.

But ask yourself this: Would you want a strategy that didn’t include a desire for a particular thing to happen? As Deborah Mills-Scofield wrote for the business review of a school in Boston, “Hope supports realistic optimism, a necessary component of success.” Maybe you don’t think it’s going to work out, but if you want it to, you might make it so. But good luck succeeding if you don’t even hope to.

Hope also seems ingrained in our American experiment. Writing for the U.S. Army War College, Col. Jeremy Weber put it this way: “Hope is not just a strategy; it is the only strategy America really has.”

It’s worked before. For all the careful planning, D-Day didn’t face great odds, and on June 5, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had to give the thumbs up or thumbs down. “Pessimism never won any battle,” he said, and then we defeated fascism for ever and ever.

Two years later, George Kennan sent his famous “Long Telegram” to the Secretary of State outlining what became our containment strategy against the Soviet Union. Forms of the word “hope” appear five times it it, including twice here: “Our only stake lies in what we hope rather than what we have,” he wrote, “and I am convinced we have better chance of realizing those hopes if our public is enlightened and if our dealings with Russians are placed entirely on realistic and matter-of-fact basis.”

And when that containment strategy led, in part, to winning the Cold War, Pres. George H. W. Bush imagined a “new world of hope and possibilities and hope for our children.” Clinton’s last National Security Strategy mentioned “the hope that this exposure may inspire others to promote democracy and the free market,” and his successor, George W. Bush, said, “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world,” which I’m now realizing might be a good argument against basing a strategy on hope, but two out of three ain’t bad.

Fast forward a few years, and all hope is lost. Trump pulled out of the Paris Accords and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and he damn near did the same to NATO. Now China and Russia are working together to mess with us, and nationalism is more popular than democracy all over the world and at participating locations in the United States. OK, maybe not all hope is lost. But a choir of insurrectionists sang about justice at a Trump rally, and I don’t think they were bragging about our judicial branch. Hope is dimming in in our faith in ability to plug the holes before we sink.

But hope still lives. My favorite and most hopeful American holiday is the NFL Draft, when a bunch of adults sit around for three days and hope that teenage athletes will turn out to be heroically successful professional football players. Even Elon Musk, who wants to colonize Mars, is hopeful about Earth. As Russell Gold described in his smart profile of Musk in Texas Monthly, Musk told Tesla shareholders, “I meet a lot of people out there who have lost hope. They think it’s too late. And they think there’s no chance, and the earth is doomed. It’s not doomed. Earth can and will be saved.”

And Ted Lasso was told at the end of season 1 that it’s the hope that’ll kill you. His team climbed back up in season 2 and is now making moves for more in season 3, a journey they could not have even embarked upon without hope.

When I told Brad I was going to write about hope and his book, he answered, “Hope is a weird word/concept.  We need hope...and we mustn't rely on it as a strategy.”

Yeah, but good luck relying on a strategy without hope. Because if you hope for something to change, then you care, and if you care, then you can find courage to change it. And I’m afraid that we’re not done with Mr. Trump, and losing hope is no way to start this next part of the fight.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

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