Grim Hopefulness

 My blogging roller coaster continues. Yesterday found me down in the dumps. So many people support Trump and (I feared/fear) will continue to support him no matter what. Why? Because he's promising to hurt groups of people whose persecution makes other groups feel good-vindicated-superior. He won the election. Voters wanted this, wanted affirmatively to purchase comfort for themselves by harming others. 

That downer-doomer post reflected where I was yesterday.

Tonight I'm in a different place, for better or worse. A skeet from Hamilton Nolan: 

We are in a dangerous time but here are two important facts: 1. Trump's base of support is a minority. 2. That base is going to shrink as his agenda is enacted. The opposition is the majority. No moping allowed. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/they-are-a...

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— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 10:09 AM

His linked Substack post unpacks things.

 When you brush away the chaotic bombardment of daily outrages and look at the actual base of support for these policies, you will see that that base is a significant minority of the public, and that it is going to shrink as the impact of the policies begins to be felt in the real world. In other words: We, the opposition, are the majority. Take heart.

It's nothing brand new. I could have (and have) told myself many of the same things he says. But it's helpful to read someone else saying them. Nor is he sanguine about the length or cost of the fight ahead:

 Let me hasten to add here that the fact that we are the majority does not mean that we are automatically going to prevail. No. That is going to take a lot of work. It is going to take a lot of organizing, and it is going to take a lot of mass communications, and it is going to take the creation of political coalitions between groups that do not care for one another, and it is going to take level of bravery and resoluteness from the Democratic Party that they have not yet displayed. But it is important to recognize all of these tasks as things that exist within the realm of possibility, and not as some sort of far-fetched dream. How do regimes manage to impose minority rule on enormous populations? By getting the majority to give up. Don’t do that.

I've posted before on here about feeling guilty for burning so many words on here about "the awfulness." I gotta get myself off of a doomer-gloomer-outrage cycle. But my therapist this week countered that it was actually good and healthy for me to get such frustrations out via writing. Where else are they gonna go? 

I similarly took some heart from another skeet/Substack, The Alt Media by Adam Parkhomenko and Sam Youngman. A confetti storm of conflicting bits of advice floods left-progressive spaces right now. Don't be distracted. Don't believe Trump. Don't fall for the con. Don't spend all your fuel on outrage. Parkhomenko and Youngman counter much of this. Yes, they concede, the Trump victory and Trump administration are wearying. BUT:

We’re not going to just throw up our hands and say oh well, it sucks that we’re so ignorant and misinformed that we elected someone who hates us and wants to hurt us. If anything, it makes us madder and makes us want to fight harder. Because the alternative is to decide which parts of Trumpism we’re ok with. And the answer is none. Not one goddamn bit of it. It is all evil. It is all corrupt. It is all anti-American. 

and

 Democrats can’t keep sending out fundraising text messages while believing that nothing matters and resistance is futile. It’s demoralizing. It’s self-defeating. It’s a total victory for Trump, and it will lead to the total collapse of our party.

and

It also means fighting every fight. We don’t have time to sit around with our thumbs up our asses trying to decide which battles will help us win elections. The answer is none of them. While so many people have struggled to learn the lessons of the 2024 election, the one that we learned is that right now the American people don’t give a damn about policies that help them. They want theater, drama, heroes and villains. They want pro wrestling, and we keep sending debate club champions to get body-slammed. It’s embarrassing.

It is past time for our party to change to a fighting posture. We can swing at every pitch. We can fight every battle. We can overreact to everything Trump and Musk are doing. We have nothing left to lose. Let’s act like it.

 "Fighting every fight"--now, on its face that seems to flout the wisdom of long-term battles, self-preservation, putting your mask on before helping others, etc. Maybe. But for me--right now--this quote acts a bit like my therapist's advice: it's OK--even good--to be angry at lots of things and to say as much. I'm not someone who enjoys expressing anger. I harbor a deep well of doubt about the righteousness of my own anger--about most anything--and an even deeper skepticism that my expressing anger ever accomplishes anything good. I tend to be very selective in what and how I complain (at least in official capacities). I don't think I have to abandon necessary lessons in taking breaks and self-care to embrace a bit more of a right to express impatience and outrage. 

The long-term veterans/heroines/martyrs of the last few centuries' grandest moral revolutions all seem to have developed a discipline of grim hopefulness at once rich, grounded, and empty. I mean "empty" in a kind of Buddhist sense of letting go of the need for immediate emotional gratification. It's similar to Vaclav Havel's notion of hope as opposed to optimism. I paraphrase: optimism believing that what you're doing will win the day; hope is doing what you're doing not because you think it will win but because it is the right thing to do. Those who realize (or helped to realize) advances in justice and equality played a long game, where patience was as necessary as passion. A commenter to Hamilton's Substack quoted at length from the leftist journalist I.F. Stone:

The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.

I've not yet been able to confirm the provenance of that quote. It may be one of those "attributed to" sayings. But it captures that sense of dogged, meaningful moral action against tyranny. And yes--I know and will delve into how many on the other side think the same thing about their causes. Yes, yes. But for right now, I needed to hear this bit of unromaticized hope.