Beat | Can democracy survive without hope?

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Mónica Guzmán:

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Hey everyone, the countdown continues, so welcome to now five weeks to that date on the calendar where people vote and our country takes its next big step. 

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Now whether you think that’s a good step or a bad step, well it’s an important question. Who will win the election really is THE question, if you look at pretty much all the breathless coverage right now about this time and this date and this process.

But the longer I do what we’re all doing here on this podcast, looking high and low for ways to defang a toxic political divide, the more I find myself drawn to another deeper question that’s come up before here and apparently won’t leave me alone.

And the question is this, no matter who wins the election, how do we make sure our Democratic Republic won’t lose? Which brings me to the heart of this week’s beat Hope. Yes, hope that simple soft sounding thing that seems so light and fluffy next to the big issues of our day The economy immigration these wars abroad Democracy as we know it to even talk about hope right now can feel cute, distracting, but mostly so naive. Greta Thunberg, the famous climate activist, once summed it up this way, “I don’t want your hope.I want you to panic.” 

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But take a few steps back with me, just to look at the big picture for a minute. Because what if hope actually is everything?

Judge Thomas Griffith (soundbyte):

“We’re going to solve that. They’re going to have solutions for this a little bit. But let’s start off, Yuval, what keeps you up at night?”

Mónica:

Back in the spring, I was invited to a conference on political polarization at the American Enterprise Institute in D.C. That’s a conservative think tank on all things public policy. And when AEI senior fellow Yuval Levin started to answer This question from former federal judge Thomas Griffith.

What keeps you up at night? My ears perked up. Take a listen. – 

Yuval Levin:

“I do worry about the condition of the country. And I think, I guess in part, my worry would begin in a similar place to Martha’s, which is the shortage of hope in our public life. I think hope is a really distinct virtue. It’s not, hope is not optimism. Hope is not the sense that things are gonna be fine.

But hope is not pessimism, of course, which says things are going to be terrible. Hope says things are up to us, and they could be good if we are good. And that sense, which has defined the American character in moments of crisis in the past, not all, but the ones we’ve gotten out of strongest, is absent now. There is not nearly enough hope, certainly among the young. There’s not enough hope in our politics. Everybody approaches the future with a sense that between us and the future, there is some calamity. And I’ve come to think that that view is an escape from responsibility. Everybody thinks the next election will determine the future of human civilization.

And our political system at its best is built to help us reduce the stakes of our politics. The next election is just an election. There’s going to be another one after it. If we get it wrong, we’ll get another chance at this. 

I think a lot of Americans now approach politics with the sense that that is not the case, that if we get this one wrong, it’s all over. Ironically, this is happening in a moment when our parties are actually pretty closely matched. Whoever wins the next election is going to have a very narrow majority and basically not be able to do anything. Why is this the moment when we’ve become persuaded that the stakes are absolute, and the fight has to be total? I think that results from a set of failures of political culture that are really what we have to worry about.”

Mónica:

Last week on this podcast, we looked at how we can navigate our political anger. In an earlier episode, my colleague, April, introduced me to a really fascinating concept from a pioneering psychologist named John Bowlby, the anger of hope versus the anger of despair. The anger of hope is the anger of protest, of speaking up so others listen up and help fix whatever’s breaking in a relationship.

And here’s what’s so cool about it. Even though the anger of hope can be fierce and painful, by definition, it values the relationship enough to expect something better, whether it’s a relationship with a spouse you’re mad at, or when you bring this to the political world, a civic relationship with your fellow Americans who make different political choices than what you think is right.

The anger of despair is something else entirely. Bowlby described it like this way back in 1976. 

“Instead of strongly rooted affection laced occasionally with hot displeasure,” Bowlby wrote.”there grows a deep running resentment. At this point, hot pleasure may in some circumstances become the cold malice of hatred.”

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Mónica:

I can’t help but think of those words.

The more our politics seem to abandon dignity for contempt and even violence. Which brings me back to that nagging question: No matter who wins this election, how do we make sure our Democratic republic won’t lose?

For some of you, this may sound kind of circular. We make sure our Democratic republic won’t lose by making sure the other side won’t win. Which, hey, makes a lot of sense when you know what’s going to make or break us going forward and that your side, whatever it is, best represents it, maybe you’re right. But one of these two sides will lose the next election. That’s how democratic things work. 

So, here are some more questions. If the losing side happens to be your side, no matter how hard you fought to prevent that, do you want to stumble out of the election not just defeated but in despair? And believing that what is core to our country will 100 % fail if the other side wins? Maybe that seems like a useless question. 

Who cares what I want to believe? This is what’s gonna happen. But is anything that predictable or certain? And in America of all places, which has been through the ringer, the last quarter millennia, and is still running this radical, imperfect experiment and getting so many wildly different people to uphold each other’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. I’m not saying don’t be vigilant.

Please, let’s be vigilant. I’m saying, what if Yuval is right? What if expecting that between us and the future is some calamity and letting any hope drain out of us as a result isn’t a practical response to the future we imagine but a way of avoiding our responsibility to build the future we deserve, and to build it with our fellow citizens who disagree with us, even if that’s sometimes painful, even if it’s laced occasionally with hot displeasure, and to build it not just when elections go our way, but every day, all the time. What if hope isn’t naive at all, but empowering? 

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Sometime last year, I read a column by one of the most illuminating bridge builders I know, the journalist Amanda Ripley. And I find myself referring back to this column over and over again.

It’s where I got that Greta Thunberg quote from earlier, actually. And as you might have guessed, it’s a column about hope. Not as a virtue per se, but as the subject of more than 30 years of research that’s showing that hope can give an actual boost to most any effort to find your way in a complicated world.

Amanda sums up the research like this, 

“Hope is more like a muscle than an emotion. It’s a cognitive skill, one that helps people reject the status quo and visualize a better way,” she writes.

“If it were in equation, it would look something like, “Hope equals goals plus roadmap, plus willpower.”

So, applying this formula to that nagging question. Do we have shared goals? Whoever any of us wants to win, none of us wants our almost 250 year old Republic to lose the next election. So that’s a start, shared goal. And when you go issue to issue and take out the gunk, clouding our view of each other across this divide, there are more, for sure. 

Do we have a roadmap? More like a whole lot of proposed roadmaps, visualizations of a stronger, healthier society from countless hearts and minds that might benefit from a little show and tell. Do we have willpower?

I think that depends on who we think we are and what we think we’re doing. Here’s Yuval Levin again from AEI. 

Yuval:

I think there are people who equate moderation with a surrender of principle, and that is not what it is. It’s really essential that people in our politics recognize that they have the wrong definition of fighting for what they believe in.

Fighting ultimately means reaching an end that advances your purpose. So, to fight for your constituents as a member of Congress is actually to make a bargain that’s advantageous to them, rather than just to stand across from other people and yell at them. That’s not fighting. That’s failing. To come to recognize that kind of moderate temperament as the beginning of successfully fighting for your principles is what it would take for us to have a functional free society. It takes a lot of learning. I mean, that understanding of things is a social achievement. It’s not a natural phenomenon. Americans don’t just fall from the sky. They have to be made by a culture that is ready to teach us to think this way.

And maybe that’s what we lack most.

Mónica:

Thank you all so much  for joining us for this beat episode of A Braver Way.

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A Braver Way is produced by Braver Angels and distributed in partnership with KUOW and to Deseret News. We get financial support from the MJ Murdoch Charitable Trust and Reclaim Curiosity and count USA Facts as a proud sponsor.

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A special thank you to Ben Caron, Don Goldberg, Gabbi Timmis, and Katelin Annes. I’m your host and guide across the divide, Mónica  Guzmán. If you want to reach out, please do. You can always find us at abraverway @braverangels.org or join our text line by texting the word BRAVE to 206-926-9955.

Take heart, everyone, and have hope. Until next time.

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